On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780674634367)

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 styles.

The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens' experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens's work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, "Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."

Author: Helen Vendler
ISBN-10: 0674634365
ISBN-13: 9780674634367
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/01/1969
Pages: 312
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.92lbs
Size: 8.15h x 5.25w x 0.99d