Description: While Wallace Stevens's short poems are perhaps his most anthologized, it is only in the longer works that we find his unique sensibilities on full display. Tracing his development through fourteen poems, Helen Vendler reveals the longer poems as the proving grounds where he tested formal innovations and discovered his own formidable strengths.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: 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.--Richard Giannone "Nation"