New Hard-Bound 'Collected' Wallace Stevens Fits Nicely on Shelf

Paper is something of an ostentation these days. All the information we need jumps off a screen and is abstracted back into electrons when we look away. "Books" are the gilded volumes that crown the achievements of the canonized. "Books" are placed strategically on a conspicuous shelf to bestow a semblance of weathered intellectualism. "Books" gather dust.

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose is a "book." It is the 51st installment of the Library of America series, the black-jacketed, red-white-and-blue-striped, gold-embossed collection from the people who bring you Penguin Classics. You might have read Absalom, Absalom out of one. Library of America specializes in collections of novels widely available in paperback which--when tastefully reset and bound in cloth--somehow warrant a $35 price tag.

Such a volume is, if nothing else, an indication of Stevens' assured legacy in the development of American poetry. A figure of such enduring merit, the argument goes, must merit a reading of all his works: not just the poetry, but also plays, lectures, notes, correspondence. The heretofore definitive Opus Posthumous was first published by Knopf two years after Stevens' death in 1955; the most recent edition contains nearly all of the poems found in the new compendium, including those not incorporated in Stevens' volumes. Collected Poetry and Prose assembles seven volumes of poetry released between 1923 and 1955, Stevens' uncollected poems, three plays, several prose pieces, notebooks, journals and letters; Opus Posthumous contains all but these last three. The few additional verses in Collected Poetry and Prose originate from Stevens' Harvard years, when he served as president of the Advocate. Several florid sonnets, one explicitly in "Imitation of Sidney," lack the tautness and precision of diction characterizing his later style. They scan too well, betraying too much of youthful impression-ability. Stevens endured nine barren years after graduation before, happily, returning to poetry.

Most surprisingly absent from Opus Posthumous is the monumental and idiosyncratic "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." Stevens outlines his perfect poetics with instructions such as "it must be abstract," and then taunts us with glistening seascapes and fragrant, ripe fruits. The prime difficulty and import of Stevens' work lies here: his subject is at once immanent and idealized, both a radiant presence and a metaphysical abstraction. In a similar fashion, Stevens' best known shorter poems, among them "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself," concern themselves with the poet's subjective experience while invoking such austere, resonant imagery as to leave the reader little room to doubt the poet's constructed world.

The Library of America volume also adds a number of addresses, including an acutely observant series on the nature of poetry and poetic language entitled "The Necessary Angel," as well as some less stimulating journal submissions such as "Insurance and Social Change" and "Surety and Fidelity Claims." (For most of his professional career, Stevens served as vice president of The Hartford.) The essays of "The Necessary Angel" provide our best account of Stevens' poetic imagination and provide assistance in unearthing an authorial intent in poetry that eludes easy inferences.

Despite the more or less chronological arrangements of the poems, Collected Poetry and Prose sheds little light on the composition of Stevens' poetic self. Letters and journals yield some understanding of Stevens-the-man, but these are never placed side by side with the contemporaneous poetry, nor are annotations provided to draw parallels between the poems and relevant passages in the correspondence. At the very end of the collection, the editors include a meager notes section and an exhaustive but thoroughly unenlightening chronology.

"Description Without (a Sense of) Place," given as the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard's 1945 Commencement exercises, serves as a key example in which the context of a collection hinders comprehension. Life has halted around the outcome of the war in Europe. Stevens declines to address the issue at all; he muses on the nature of description. Poetry goes on. "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of imagination are two different things," Stevens had said in 1942, and from this "struggle with fact" hoped to distill some poignant truth. The Collected Poems and Prose editors grant this background a sentence in the chronology, nothing more. Placed in the continuum of verse, "Description" loses this crucial opposition and flounders for reference.

In the absence of an external Stevens, Stevens' poetic self as represented in Collected Poems and Prose resembles a passage from "Esthetique du Mal": "And out of what one sees and hears and out / Of what one feels, who could have thought to make / So many selves, so many sensuous worlds," Stevens asks. His poetic text has this mystifying effect, transforming what we see and hear and what we feel. A collection that demystifies the texts has explained too much. One that leaves a reader inundated with text has explained too little, and belongs where it can be of some use: back on the shelf.