A selective list of online literary criticism the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites
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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, Fall, 1996
Balbo, Ned. Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. Art Journal, Spring, 1994
Bates, M.J. "The Emperor of Hartford." A review of Bates' Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1985). Reviewer Dana Gioia writes "When asked to name the greatest French poet of the 19th century, Andre Gide replied, ''Victor Hugo - helas!'' Some American readers, if asked to choose their foremost modern poet, might echo Gide's perplexity by answering, ''Wallace Stevens, alas.'' For though Stevens ranks high among the most deserving candidates, he hardly offers Americans the sort of national poet they might like. Affluent, aloof and undemocratic, Stevens so deeply contradicted the available stereotypes of the American poet that for years bewildered critics inaccurately classified him as sui generis, an inexplicable hybrid of two seemingly irreconcilable sides of the American experience - business and poetry." NYTimes, 10/27/85
Beehler, Michael. "Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things." 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." Criticism, Wntr, 1993
Beyers, Chris. "Critical Studies in a Post-Theoretical Age: Three Books Sort of about Wallace Stevens." Lengthy article discusses Eeckhout, Bart. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing. (Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002); Harrington, Joseph.Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modem U. S. Poetics. (Wesleyan University Press, 2002); Santilli, Kristine S. Poetic Gesture: Myth, Wallace Stevens, and the Motions of Poetic Language. (Routledge, 2002) In College Literature, Fall 2005
Brazeau, Peter. A review of Peter Brazeau's Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (1983) NYTimes
Conte, Joseph. "The Smooth and the Striated: Compositional Texture in the Modern Long Poem." 'The "smooth texts" among twentieth-century long poems might include Wallace Stevens's "Auroras of Autumn" (1947), James Schuyler's The Morning of the Poem (1980), John Ashbery's Flow Chart (1991), A. R. Ammons's Garbage (1993), Clark Coolidge's The Crystal Text (1986), and David Antin's Tuning (1984).... The "striated texts" among the twentieth-century long poems might include Pound's The Cantos (1972), Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems (1983), Robert Duncan's "Passages" series, Lyn Hejinian's My Life (1987), Ronald Johnson's Ark (1996), and John Cage's Themes and Variations' (1982). In Modern Language Studies 27 (Spring 1997): 57-71
Doreski, C.K. "Proustian closure in Wallace Steven's 'The Rock' and Elizabeth Bishop's 'Geography III.'" 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.'" Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998
Doreski, William. "Wallace Stevens in Connecticut," Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993
Filreis, Alan. 'Beyond The Rhetorician's Touch': Stevens' Painterly Abstractions," Article explores why--given Stevens' interest in painting and in abstraction--he did not acquire American abstract paintings. American Literary History, Spring 1992, pp. 230-63
Foust, Graham. "Wallace Stevens's Manuscript As If in The Dump" An article notes Stevens' habit of carrying around bits of paper with poems jotted on them. Foust writes, "These 'little slips of paper,' as Stevens himself calls them, these scraps of value, resemble nothing if not dollar bills." In Jacket 14, 2001
Jenkins, Lee M. An introduction to Wallace Stevens from the Literary Encyclopedia, 09 December 2004
Kertzer, Jon. The course of a particular: on the ethics of literary singularity. Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004
Morse, Samuel French. A review of Samuel French Morse Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry (1970) NYTimes
Qian, Zhaoming. A review of Qian's The Modernist Response to Chinese Art (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2003). Reviewed in Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2004 by Feng Lan [Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, ekphrasis]
Richardson, Joan. A review of Joan Richardson's Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955 (1989) NYTimes
Vendler, Helen. "The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar" "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." The 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities
Vendler, Helen. A review Professor Vendler's study of Wallace Stevens, On Extended Wings. Reviewed by Harold Bloom in the NYTimes, 1969
Woodward, Kathleen M. At last, the real distinguished thing: the late poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams (Ohio Univ. Press, 1980). [T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, poetry of old age]. The complete book is available online, courtesy of Ohio University Press
Filreis, Alan. "Description without a Sense of Place," Chapter 3 of Alan Filreis's Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, Princeton University Press, 1991 (removed from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/vangeyzel.html)
Filreis, Alan. A review of Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, & Literary Radicalism, by Alan Filreis. Reviewed by Paul Giles. in Borderlines; Studies in American Culture, 3, 1 (Sept. 1995) (removed from http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/right-left-review.html)
A biography of Wallace Stevens from the Modern American Poetry Site (Univ. of Illinois)
Wallace Stevens section at the Modern American Poetry Site re-prints 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." (Univ. of Illinois)
A good introduction to Wallace Stevens, this biography, themes, and techniques, with samples of his poems, from the Poetry Foundation
Teaching Wallace Stevens from the Annenberg/PBS project "American Passages"
Issues for teachers and readers of Stevens' poetry from Heath guides (moved or removed)
A Yale Library exhibition documents the influence of Oriental aesthetics on American Modernists including Wallace Stevens and others
NYTimes obituary of Wallace Stevens
A 1931 NY Times review of Harmonium
A 1947 Times review of "Transport to Summer"
A 1948 Times review of "A Primitive Like an Orb"
A 1950 Times review of "The Auroras of Autumn"
A 1954 Times review of Stevens' Collected Poems
A 1954 profile of Stevens from the NY Times
A 1957 Times review of Opus Posthumous.
A 1982 review of Stevens' poetry by Anatole Broyard
A 1986 NY Times review of The Letters of Wallace Stevens.
An innovative visual presentation of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Edward Picot, 2007
Web site for "the friends and enemies of Wallace Stevens" contains news about Stevens-related events
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