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 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674634365
• ISBN13: 9780674634367
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 312 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.3" x 8.2"

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.