This comprehensive study of the ideas of music in Wallace Stevens' poetry «rereads» Stevens as a poet whose compositional strategies assimilate musical forms and performative programs. The «decomposer» is the poet of qualification, who constantly explores the validity of «developing variation» as the best means for creating art not limited by system or medium. As both subject and strategy for poetry, music becomes Stevens' most frequently used figure connecting his art to the rhythms of modern life. Thus, to disregard Stevens' ideas of music is to misread the text.

Wallace Stevens’s musicality is so profound that scholars have only begun to grasp his ties to the art of music or the music of his own poetry. In this study, two long-time specialists present a polyphonic composition in which they pursue various interlocking perspectives. Their case studies demonstrate how music as a temporal art form may affect a poetic of ephemerality, sensuous experience, and affective intensification. Such a poetic, they argue, invites flexible interpretations that respond to poetry as an art of textual performance. How did Stevens enact the relation between music and memory? How can we hear his verse as a form of melody-making? What was specific to his ways of recording birdsong? Have we been missing the latent music of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and Claude Debussy in particular poems? What were the musical poetics he shared with Igor Stravinsky? And how is our experience of the late poetry transformed when we listen to a musical setting by Ned Rorem? The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens will appeal to experts in the poet’s work, students of Modernism in the arts, and a wider audience fascinated by the dynamics of exchange between music and poetry.

A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself in everyday life: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.” This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magisterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world. This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens’s nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.

This detailed critical study of Wallace Stevens identifies the major concerns of his poetry. Lucy Beckett presents Stevens as a contemplative poet, engaged on a long enquiry into the nature of the relationship between the creative imagination and the world it illuminates and recreates.

Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life delves into every phase of Stevens' life--from his childhood in Pennsylvania, his years at Harvard, and his short stay in New York to his life-long choice of a home in Hartford, Connecticut, and a career in the insurance business. The importance of Stevens' relationship to his father is stressed, and also the contribution to his growth of Santayana, Bergson, Pater, and Pascal, among others. His deep feeling for things French, and his unusual appreciation of painting are also assessed, as they relate to the development of his finely tempered artistry and special conception of art.

In a letter from January 1955, Wallace Stevens referred to Paul Valery as a "prodigy of poetry." Stevens' correspondence reveals that he was long familiar with both Valery's poetry and prose. Scholars from the early days of Stevens criticism to the present - from Frank Kermode to Harold Bloom and Eleanor Cook - have acknowledged Valery's importance for Stevens and noted the mark of Valery's poetics on Stevens' prose and poetry. However, until now, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the affinities between these two. The first full-length study of its kind, The Figure Concealed explores the multiple parallels between these two great 20th century poets. The book brings Valery's and Stevens' poetics and poetry into conversation, and focuses on the resonance of Valery's musical ideas in Stevens' poetic theory and practice. Early chapters focus on the interlacing of their work poetically and philosophically, while later chapters increasingly focus on the readings of Stevens through the lens of Valeryan musical-poetic theory. Stevens' letters, essays, and poems are examined alongside Valery's Cahiers Notebooks], essays, and poems to amplify the Valeryan echo throughout Stevens' work. The Figure Concealed makes an important contribution to studies of modern poetry and to Stevens scholarship in particular. It offers a new and transformative comparative study and proposes a musical poetics which will be important for scholars of modern poetry, and of Stevens and Valery. It will appeal to all those interested in the relationship between music and poetry, the arts more broadly, as well as aesthetics and philosophy.

Beginning with a biographical sketch of Stevens, this volume analyzes each of Stevens' major works, emphasizing the larger patterns of his work through detailed readings of representative poems. Rehder also discusses Stevens' debt to French poetry. ISBN 0-312-00860-0: $32.50.

This book explores the reasons for Stevens's delight in the act of transformation, the philosophical undertones that the act of transformation suggests, and the symbolic landscape of the "imagined land" that he creates in the combined effort of the poems of transformation. The author has done excellent research into the man and the poet.