Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things

by James Longenbach

Overview

'This distinguished book sets forth the Stevens that we will be reading for at least the next three decades: a Stevens in close touch with political and social conditions, a Stevens whose poetry arises from the texture of his times.'-Louis Martz

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195070224
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	08/28/1991
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	356
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.02(d)
Lexile:	1360L (what's this?)

About the Author

University of Rochester

Table of Contents

I	The First Silence
1	Pecksniff and Politics	3
2	The Literary Profession	14
3	Populism and Imperialism	24
II	Thinking About War
4	The Great War and Post-Romantic Ambition	41
5	Writing War Poetry	53
6	The Fellowship of Men that Perish	65
7	Postwar Comedian	83
III	The Second Silence
8	Surety and Fidelity Claims	105
9	Paris and the Florida Land Boom	120
IV	Poetry and Social Change
10	Lefts and Lefts	135
11	Ideas of Ambiguity	148
12	The Politics of Despair	176
V	Rethinking War
13	Violence Within, Violence Without	199
14	It Must Be Masculine	222
15	The Heart of the Debacle	237
16	It Must Be Humdrum	249
VI	The Affluent Mundo
17	The Ultimate Politician	277
18	A New Knowledge of Reality	293
	Notes	307
	Index of Works	331
	General Index	334

Editorial Reviews

"Longenbach has crafted a strong personal interpretation of Stevens' poetry that deserves a place among the half-dozen major studies of Stevens on our shelves."—Wallace Stevens Journal

"An intelligent in-depth study."—Ken Norris, University of Maine

"Deftly mixes biography and criticism....Longenbach himself writes a plain, clear prose, which keeps his arguments refreshingly clear."—Washington Post Book World

"In convincingly linking Stevens' work with world events and movements, Longenbach may succeed in stripping some of the otherworldly aura from Stevens' work and encourage even non-academics to listen more closely to the blue guitar."—Hartford Courant

"Closely reasoned, clearly recited, Mr. Longenbach's purposes are severe and designed: he would read Stevens with the undistracted assumption that, as the poet said at the end, 'there is a conflict, there is a resistance involved.' This comes to no less, and no worse, than proposing against the three famous stipulations for a Supreme Fiction (pleasure, change, abstraction), three ulterior demands for responses to pain, sameness, plain sense. Ransacking (and often overruling) a whole library of critics and biographers, though always with amenity, Longenbach tenably proposes a Stevens on the wrong side of Paradise, and reminds us as he proceeds that we now read our greatest (twentieth-century American) poet as we have learned to read Dante, against the grain of his ideas and his time, treasuring, at last, the contingencies we once thought it was such a glory to transcend. Per astra ad ardua.—Richard Howard

From the Publisher