How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens (Muse Books) Kindle Edition

An interesting take by someone who knows Stevens inside out.

Not what I was looking for. No poems, only writers opinions and understandings.

Joan Richardson’s How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens is a succinct, remarkably clear distillation of the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of Stevens’ life and work. Her credentials are relevant and worth mentioning. Her fascination with the poet began in her teens and, in her mid-twenties, culminated in a doctoral dissertation. Over the next ten years she continued her research and, in 1986 and 1988, published a two-volume biography of Stevens. She has stated that during the years she worked on the biography she “attempted to make my sensibility his as much as possible,” and her dedication bore fruit: the volumes are widely regarded as the clearest and most detailed guide yet available, not only to Stevens’ life and the influences that shaped him, but also to his collected prose and poetry. Helen Vendler noted it to be, and likely to remain, the definitive biography of the poet. More recently, Richardson was invited by the editor of Muse Books: The Iowa Series in Creativity and Writing to contribute a volume on Stevens. Within the 25,000 word limit prescribed for these texts, intended to illuminate the process of shaping words into art, Richardson employs and explicates much of the vocabulary and many of the rhetorical/psychological strategies Stevens used in his poetry. This is an important work of literary criticism and so finely crafted that it might be called a work of art in its own right. For readers coming to Stevens for the first time, it successfully clarifies and illuminates so many of his obscurities and puzzles that it will feel like a flashlight in the dark. For readers already knowledgeable about Stevens, this capstone text provides a beautiful overview and reminder of the achievements of the man who is possibly America’s greatest poet. I’m now retired, but I wish I had been able to recommend this book when I was teaching Stevens in university classrooms.

The author is an expert on Wallace Stevens poetry and has written longer works. This book is a short condensed version of those other works. Even though it is short there is still a lot of information included. It is not a quick read. If you are not familiar with Stevens this book is a good introduction. Enjoy

A really interesting read