* Introduction: The Two Poetries I. The Pensive Man: The Pensive Style II. Fugal Requiems The Comedian as the Letter C, Sunday Morning, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle III. The Sausage Maker Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird IV. The Volcano Apostrophe, The Sea Behold Owl's Clover V. A Duct with the Undertaker The Man with the Blue Guitar VI. Abecedarium of Finesoldier Examination of the Hero in a Time of War VII. The Amassing Harmony Notes toward a Supreme Fiction VIII. The Metaphysical Changes Esthetique du Mal and Description without Place IX. Douceurs, Tristesses Credences of Sunnner and The Auroras of Autumn X. The Total Leaflessness An Ordinary Evening in New Haven XI. Naked Alpha: Epilogue * Notes
Helen Vendler (1933–2024) was a leading poetry critic and the author of nineteen books on poets from William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, she contributed regularly to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, and the New Republic. She was the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.
[Vendler's] study of Stevens' longer poems is a difficult,
brilliant book that everywhere illuminates not only the specific
poems under inspection and Stevens' other work, but our ideas of
poetry in general. Her own style, rising to its subject, is
capacious and inventive, witty and astringent, intensely dedicated
to distinguishing Stevens' finest poems, or moments in poems, from
his less fine ones. The result is true criticism, and it comes
through most vividly in her discussions of 'Man with the Blue
Guitar,' 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,' and 'Auroras of Autumn.'
A book to be read and reread, it is absolutely essential for the
way it sends us back to the poems it so lovingly and sternly
anatomizes.
*Choice*
[Vendler] has written a superb and badly needed book giving us
readings unlikely to be surpassed of Stevens's longer poems…Mrs.
Vendler is a commentator almost clairvoyant…Her book ought to be
read, with care and gratitude, by every reader of Stevens, for no
critic before her has understood so well his major poems.
*New York Times Book Review*
This study of Stevens' long poems centers around problems defined
by the poetry itself: its style and form, its evolving shape. In
treating these problems intelligently, Mrs. Vendler deepens the
exploration of Wallace Stevens into penetration. For this reason,
among others, On Extended Wings is valuable and special.
*Nation*
A clear and detailed study that should become indispensable to
understanding Stevens’ work.
*Boston Globe*
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