Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life (Literary Lives)

Product Description Wallace Stevens, one of this centurys foremost American poets, has been both praised and blamed for the difficulty of his poems and has bemused those seeking to reconcile the sobriety of his career as an insurance lawyer with the extravagance of his poetry. In this book, Tony Sharpe explores the symbiotic and antagonistic relations between Stevens literary life and his working life as senior executive. He outlines the personal, historical, and publishing contexts which shaped his writing career, and suggests how awareness of these contexts sheds new light on the poems. Stevens was uncompromising in his insistence on the extraordinary importance of poetry to the ordinary world, and in this appreciative but not uncritical study, Sharpe tries to see the man behind the mandarin, while seeking not to simplify the sumptuous austerities of a major modernist writer. From Publishers Weekly Details about Stevenss education, professional life, acquaintances and family life--from sources including Stevenss extensive journals and elliptical letters and from previous biographies--are plentiful here. But the poems themselves, as in the last line of The Snow Man, warn of nothing that is not there and the nothing that is when attempting to link reality to the products of the imagination. In this biographys first hundred pages, Sharpe, head of the department of English at Lancaster University, indirectly exposes these difficulties in zealous shuttling between cultural contexts (suggestive parallels in modernism in visual arts, the startup of little magazines, Pound and Eliots aesthetics) and Stevenss personal quirks (his resourceful destitution and reclusive predilections). Sharpe finally and more concretely discovers terra firma in the Stevens of the late 1930s and early 40s, whose more prolific output of poetry and prose urgently returns repeatedly to poetrys relation to reality: His role, in short, is to help people live their lives. Still, what is eerily lacking here is a sense of the poems; very few quotations or discussions exist, except briefly of Sunday Morning and Anecdote of the Jar and occasional glimpses of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. If, for Stevens, poetry is a special kind of thinking, Joan Richardsons two-volume set of psychological and philosophical investigation remains the standard. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal An increasing number of books on the life and work of Wallace Stevens have been published in the past few decades. What distinguishes this one is the irony of the subtitle: it is well known that Stevens did not devote his life exclusively to poetry but, instead, managed to achieve a puzzling equilibrium between the reality of his corporate job and the imagination of his poetic mind. Sharpe notes every obscure incident and virtually every aspect of the poets intractable and often intolerant character, including his uncompromising need for privacy. It is impossible to read this without speculating about the astonishing amount of time and effort it must have taken to compile all those explicit details of Stevenss life and then convincingly to point to their significance in our understanding of Stevenss verse. Arguably, not all these details were essential, but most of them do cast a different light on Stevenss renowned poems, such as Sunday Morning. Two things are necessary to make sense of Sharpes intimidating but intelligent thesis: an interest in Stevenss work and a copy of his Collected Poetry and Prose. Without them, this tome will only prove useful to the veritable connoisseur of Stevenss chaos.AMirela Roncevic, Library Journal Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A carefully, if narrowly, drawn map of the battle lines in poet Stevenss aesthetic and personal struggles. A British specialist in modern and American literature, Sh