Wallace Stevens Words Chosen Out of Desire

[This book] tells the reader a good deal more about Wallace Stevens's poetry and Stevens as a poet than many a weighty tome...The shining merit of these lectures is their capacity to elucidate single poems, some familiar anthology pieces, others much less familiar, so that they stand alone as comprehensible entities. The key to this success is the devotion that has accompanied her patience, a devotion that responds, in particular, to the warmth and sadness, the emotional depth, that Vendler finds in Stevens...Those readers who have sensed both the urgency of feeling and the forlornness in Stevens's poems, but have found the obliquities of his manner and diction often impenetrable, will be grateful for the tact and moderation of these fresh interpretations. Their special achievements are that they convince, movingly and with a simplicity not often found in Stevens commentary, and that they then leave the poem to reassemble in the mind as wholly itself.Vendler, Helen H. is the author of 'Wallace Stevens Words Chosen Out of Desire', published 1986 under ISBN 9780674945753 and ISBN 0674945751.