Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
A selective list of online literary criticism for the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens, favoring signed scholarly articles and books, peer-reviewed sources, sources supervised by (named) editors, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites.
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Literary criticism
Ausubel, Jonathan. "'This Hot, Dependent Orator': Shifting Narrative Stance and the Collision of Speaker and Reader in 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.'" Twentieth Century Literature (1996).
Balbo, Ned. "Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism." Art Journal (1994). [removed]
Beehler, Michael. "Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things." Criticism (1993). A review of three scholarly studies of Wallace Stevens that seek "to advance our understanding of Stevens's work by exploring his poetry from perspectives that are not singularly aesthetic or literary."
Beyers, Chris. "Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of About Wallace Stevens." College Literature (2005). Lengthy review article discusses Bart Eeckhout's Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing; Joseph Harrington's Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics; and Kristine S. Santilli's Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language.
Conte, Joseph. "The Smooth and the Striated: Compositional Texture in the Modern Long Poem." Modern Language Studies 27 (1997). Says Conte, "The 'smooth texts' among twentieth-century long poems might include Wallace Stevens's 'Auroras of Autumn,' James Schuyler's 'The Morning of the Poem,' John Ashbery's 'Flow Chart,' A. R. Ammons's 'Garbage,' Clark Coolidge's 'The Crystal Text,' and David Antin's 'Tuning'...The 'striated texts' among the twentieth-century long poems might include Pound's 'The Cantos,' Charles Olson's 'The Maximus Poems,' Robert Duncan's 'Passages' series, Lyn Hejinian's 'My Life,' Ronald Johnson's 'Ark,' and John Cage's 'Themes and Variations.'"
Doreski, C.K. "Proustian closure in Wallace Stevens's 'The Rock' and Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III." Twentieth Century Literature (1998). Writes Doreski, "shaped by awareness of impending death, Wallace Stevens's final gathering of poems, published in his 1954 Collected Poems as 'The Rock,' and Elizabeth Bishop's last original collection, published in 1976 as Geography III, enact the cycle of relinquishment familiar to readers of T. S. Eliot's 'Little Gidding.'"
Doreski, William. "Wallace Stevens in Connecticut." Twentieth Century Literature (1993).
Filreis, Alan. "'Beyond the Rhetorician's Touch': Stevens's Painterly Abstractions." American Literary History (1992). Filreis explores why--given Stevens's interest in painting and in abstraction--he did not acquire American abstract paintings.
Foust, Graham. "Wallace Stevens's Manuscript As If in The Dump." Jacket 14 (2001). Foust notes Stevens's habit of carrying around bits of paper with poems jotted on them: "These 'little slips of paper,' as Stevens himself calls them, these scraps of value, resemble nothing if not dollar bills."
Kertzer, Jon. "The Course of a Particular: On the Ethics of Literary Singularity." Twentieth Century Literature (2004).
Lan, Feng. A rev. of The Modernist Response to Chinese Art, by Zhaoming Qian. Twentieth Century Literature (2004). [Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, ekphrasis].
Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens, Musing the Obscure: Readings, an Interpretation, and a Guide to the Collected Poetry. New York: New York UP, 1967. The complete book, reprinted by permission. Close readings of "The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage," "Domination of Black," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "The Comedian as the Letter C," "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds," "Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb," "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Sunday Morning," "Bantams in Pine-Woods," "To the One of Fictive Music," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Anatomy of Monotony," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Evening without Angels," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "The Man on the Dump," "Connoisseur of Chaos," "The Sense of the Sleight-of-hand Man," "Of Modern Poetry," "Asides on the Oboe," "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," "Dutch Graves in Bucks County," "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters," "So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch," "Esthetique du Mal," "Man Carrying Thing," "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "Large Red Man Reading," "This Solitude of Cataracts," "Saint John and the Back-Ache," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," "The Plain Sense of Things," "Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly," "Long and Sluggish Lines," "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "The Rock," "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," "The Course of a Particular," "Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination," "Solitaire under the Oaks," "Local Objects," "Artificial Populations," "A Clear Day and No Memories," "As You Leave the Room," "Of Mere Being."
Vendler, Helen. "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar." Jefferson Lecture, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2004. Says Vendler, "The secular angel refreshing our sense of the world, apparelled in Wordsworthian light, stays only for a moment, our moment of attention. But that moment of mental acuity recalls us to being, the body, and the emotions, which are, peculiarly, so easy for us to put to one side as we engage in purely intellectual or physical work."
Woodward, Kathleen M. At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: the Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams. Ohio UP, 1980. [T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, poetry of old age]. The complete book is available online, courtesy of Ohio UP.
Filreis, Alan. "Description without a Sense of Place." Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton UP, 1991 [removed from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/vangeyzel.html]
Giles, Paul. A review of Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism, by Alan Filreis. Borderlines; Studies in American Culture 3 (1995) [removed from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/right-left-review.html]
Introduction
"A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens." The Nation, 26 Aug., 2009. Literary scholar and poet James Longenbach on Stevens.
"Wallace Stevens." Modern American Poetry. Eds. Edward Brunner, John Timberman Newcomb, and Cary Nelson. Biography, and excerpts from major critical discussions of the following poems: "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Floral Decorations for Bananas," "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," "Anecdote of the Jar," "Disillusionment of 10 O' Clock," "The Snow Man," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Sunday Morning," "The Death of a Soldier," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Mozart, 1935," "A Postcard from the Volcano," "Study of Two Pears," "Of Modern Poetry," "The Course of a Particular," "The Plain Sense of Things," "As You Leave the Room," "A Clear Day and No Memories," "Of Mere Being."
"Wallace Stevens." Poetry Foundation. Ed. Catherine Halley. Good, encyclopedia-type introduction to Stevens, his biography, themes, and techniques, with samples of his poems.
Jenkins, Lee M. "Wallace Stevens." Literary Encyclopedia. 9 Dec., 2004. Eds. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott, Janet Todd. An introduction to Stevens, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription.
"Wallace Stevens." Academy of American Poets. A brief introduction to Stevens.
"Wallace Stevens." 11: Modernist Portraits. American Passages: A Literary Survey. Ed.Laura Arnold. A site developed for teachers, collaboration between the Public Broadcasting Service and W.W. Norton.
Reviews at the New York Times
NY Times articles require registration, which is free.
1947 rev. of Transport to Summer.
1948 rev. of A Primitive Like an Orb.
1950 rev. of The Auroras of Autumn.
1954 profile of Wallace Stevens.
Bloom, Harold. A rev. of On Extended Wings, by Helen Vendler (1969).
Broyard, Anatole. 1982 rev. of Stevens's poetry.
Gioia, Dana. "The Emperor of Hartford." A rev. of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, by M.J. Bates. 27 Oct. 1985.
A 1986 rev. of The Letters of Wallace Stevens.
Rev. of Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, by Peter Brazeau (1983).
Rev. of Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry, by Samuel French Morse (1970).
Rev. of Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955, by Joan Richardson (1989).
Web Sites
The Wallace Stevens Journal. Ed. John N. Serio. Web site for the scholarly journal, contains information about subscribing, an online Stevens concordance, and more.
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Edward Picot, 2007. An innovative visual interpretation of the poem.
Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens. Web site of a group devoted to preserving Stevens's legacy in Hartford, Conn., and beyond.
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