On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems

By Helen Vendler

Book Overview

Though Wallace Stevens' shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens' central theme--the worth of the imagination--remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description--which must be repetitive--of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles. The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens' work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674634357
• ISBN13: 9780674634350
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 334 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The music of the longer poems

For those who love the poetry of Wallace Stevens this work provides an extended exploration and revelation of his meanings and methods. Vendler speaks of the Stevens of three mood modes, the celebrant of vigorous life , the apathetic indifferent desolate soul, the mediating in between hesitant , tentative maker of his own careful music. Vendler notes that the Stevens often studied for his rare vocabulary is also the maker of innovations in syntax. She reads and explicates and provides understanding of one of the century's master poets. And she shows how in the longer poems the greatest of all Stevens' can be found.