On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems

“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.”
—Harold Bloom, New York Times Book Review

A virtuosic reading of Stevens’s most difficult poems brings their austere beauty and elaborately mannered movements to life.

If “poetry is the subject of the poem,” as Wallace Stevens once declared, so too is the poet. A poet’s temperament, his attractions and r...