Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate

This book is a masterpiece which is not to say it's perfect and not to say that it's for everyone. When you read the negative criticisms below please keep a few things in mind. First--and foremost---this is a book is an academic exercise written by one of America's foremost scholars in American and English literature. This book is written for people who have a VAST knowledge of literature, especially English and American Romanticism and in particular POETIC Romanticism. The less you of those things the less you will get out of this book. THIS BOOK IS NOT INTENDED AS A READER'S GUIDE FOR THE CASUAL READER. This books is primarily for literature scholars. That doesn't make it snobbish or boring in and of itself. Imagine a book on a new theory of engine building (to take a raw example)--if you don't know engines as well as a mechanic does the book will not be helpful to you. That doesn't make it a dumb or boring book. So realize what you're getting into before you buy and avoid needless mental bloodshed. Secondly, I just love the accusations of narcissism. Sheesh. ALL literary criticism is a reflection of the author's ideas about literature! Of COURSE it is. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT. TO GIVE YOU THE AUTHOR'S VIEW OF THIS PIECE OF LITERATURE IN THE CONTEXT OF PAST LITERATURE AS THE AUTHOR SEES IT!!!. If you want to dismiss all criticism as narcissism, go right ahead. That view will save you a lot of reading time. Again, this is a great book. Just know what kind of book it is and decide if that's what you'd like to tackle.

As a lifelong reader of Stevens, I believe that the two most illumating studies have been Helen Vendler's On Extended Wings and this volume by Harold Bloom. His approach is certainly unconventional in that he starts his thesis with Emerson and categories of figurative writing. He adds to the mix some Wordsworth, Whitman , and Nietzsche and attempts to place Stevens in a lineage of thought and expression. Examining the small and large works on equal footing in chronological order makes a compelling case for our imagining Stevens as human, "all too human," perhaps. Although I would not agree with a number of his readings, I'm grateful to read and re-read this book.

Harold Bloom is probably my favorite critic, and Stevens one of the only 20th century poets in English I can bear to read without becoming hopelessly bored by the belatedness of the work. Bloom's book here is a close reading of the standard shorter and longer works of Stevens, and in so doing, Bloom shows how Steven's language and metaphor place him in the line of such Romantic poets as Keats, SHelly, and then of course, and most importantly, Whitman and Emerson. Emerson of course wrote rather weak poetry but his conception of the poet and his call for an American bard remain so strong today that very few poets/writers have the cognitive strength to deal with him. Most American writers fall back into the trope of nostalgia and flight (courtesy of Brockdon Brown); Stevens wrestled with this too, but his work ultimately stands in the orphic tradition of American poetry founded by Emerson, and whose strongest exemplars are of course Whitman and probably the Pan-American Pablo Neruda.My only criticism of this book is that a) it does not address the great late poem "Sail of Ulysses," which is one of the most Emersonian poems in Steven's canon; further, b), Bloom's tone in this book, as compared with most of his others about the Romantic tradition, is not quite so strident. Some don't like Bloom at when he is strident, but I love his work the more he sounds like a high-toned Christian preacher in his Emersonian pulpit. However, it may be that Bloom is unable to rise to such heights in this book because, as great as Stevens is, he never truly defeated his agon with Emerson and Whitman; he never truly overcame his belatedness. Stevens came very near to doing so in his best work, but I am sorry to say that I think Stevens remains an ephebe to Emerson and Whitman. That is not to reduce his achievement; very few poets are able to defeat their precursors. Stevens is a canonical poet without a doubt; however, when I then open Whitman or Neruda, I see that his voice is indeed quite a bit weaker than theirs. The little old lady from Des Moines will then say, "yes sir of course, but whose voices could ever be as strong as theirs?!" And I would say to her then hallelujah madame!

Those of us who have bathed in the dazzling light of Bloom's exegeses of the Shakespeare plays will find on display in this volume a more obscure side of the great critic. The reader encounters here an earlier edition of Bloom, one who now expresses himself in sometimes tortuous prose and unwieldy language, now bludgeons rather than dissects. This Bloom has not yet gained his sure footing in the sparse, pithy prose of his more recent works which reveal him to be a master interpreter. Still, there is much here to admire; for Bloom shows us Steven's pedigree with marvelous clarity. Beginning with Emerson and proceeding to Whitman, Dickinson, Harte and others, Bloom illuminates Steven's debt to the rich provender on which he drew. (My own acquaintance with Emerson had languished since high school , but I soon found myself reading Emerson's superb essay on Shakespeare and Whitman's Leaves of Grass with a new eye.) Bloom shows how 'the American religion', an atheistic blending of respect for individual rights, power, will, and fate found their firm expression in Emerson and travelled onward to inform the poetry which followed, especially Stevens'. Bloom shows us how the tropes of fate, death, mother, and the sea wind through the years as each poet in turn struggles to express a uniquely American sense of meaning. True enough, Bloom fiddles too much with the technical bits, but he gives us a place from which to view Stevens' work so that we can now grasp why, as Bloom says, he was the greatest American poet of the 20th century- and perhaps of any century. Such favorites as The Auroras of Autumn, The Man with the Blue Guitar, The Emperor of Ice Cream and a score of others shine for us in a new light. Best of all, the reader carries with him the secret knowledge that despite these early slips,Bloom's brilliance will only grow.