Word: prose
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is a "book." It is the 51st installment of the Library of America series, the black-jacketed, red-white-and-blue-striped, gold-embossed collection from the people who bring you Penguin Classics. You might have read Absalom, Absalom out of one. Library of America specializes in collections of novels widely available in paperback which--when tastefully reset and bound in cloth--somehow warrant a $35 price...
...poetry, but also plays, lectures, notes, correspondence. The heretofore definitive Opus Posthumous was first published by Knopf two years after Stevens' death in 1955; the most recent edition contains nearly all of the poems found in the new compendium, including those not incorporated in Stevens' volumes. Collected Poetry and Prose assembles seven volumes of poetry released between 1923 and 1955, Stevens' uncollected poems, three plays, several prose pieces, notebooks, journals and letters; Opus Posthumous contains all but these last three. The few additional verses in Collected Poetry and Prose originate from Stevens' Harvard years, when he served as president...
Despite the more or less chronological arrangements of the poems, Collected Poetry and Prose sheds little light on the composition of Stevens' poetic self. Letters and journals yield some understanding of Stevens-the-man, but these are never placed side by side with the contemporaneous poetry, nor are annotations provided to draw parallels between the poems and relevant passages in the correspondence. At the very end of the collection, the editors include a meager notes section and an exhaustive but thoroughly unenlightening chronology...
...muses on the nature of description. Poetry goes on. "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of imagination are two different things," Stevens had said in 1942, and from this "struggle with fact" hoped to distill some poignant truth. The Collected Poems and Prose editors grant this background a sentence in the chronology, nothing more. Placed in the continuum of verse, "Description" loses this crucial opposition and flounders for reference...
...absence of an external Stevens, Stevens' poetic self as represented in Collected Poems and Prose resembles a passage from "Esthetique du Mal": "And out of what one sees and hears and out / Of what one feels, who could have thought to make / So many selves, so many sensuous worlds," Stevens asks. His poetic text has this mystifying effect, transforming what we see and hear and what we feel. A collection that demystifies the texts has explained too much. One that leaves a reader inundated with text has explained too little, and belongs where it can be of some use: back...