On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems

Though Wallace Stevens€ shorter poems are perhaps his best known, his longer poems, Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests in this book, deserve equal fame and equal consideration. Stevens€ central theme€•the worth of the imagination€•remained with him all his life, and Mrs. Vendler therefore proposes that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description€•which must be repetitive€•of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

The author presents here a chronological account of fourteen longer poems that span a thirty-year period, showing, through Stevens€ experiments in genre, diction, syntax, voice, imagery, and meter, the inventive variety of Stevens€ work in long forms, and providing at the same time a coherent reading of these difficult poems. She concludes, €œStevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later long poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work.€