The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y. / 1971 / 545 pp

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“Her terrace was the sand/ And the palms and the twilight” - and those are only the first two lines. Dipping into surrealism and imbued with spirituality, his poetry is compiled into “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,” which includes seven compilations of his work.

Over his lifetime, Stevens wrote several books of poetry, but his exquisite poems are best taken by themselves: the lush grandeur of “Sunday Morning,” the hymn-like “Le Monocle De Mon Oncle,” and the humid grittiness of “O Florida, Venereal Soil.” He takes multiple looks at “Thirteen Ways of Looking At A Blackbird,” and the lush “Six Significant Landscapes.”

In other poems, Stevens dips into outright surrealism, like in the delicate “Tattoo” (“There are filaments of your eyes/ On the surface of the water/ And in the edges of the snow”), and also adds a meditative bent into “The Snow Man” (“For the listener, who listens in the snow/ And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is”).

If nothing else, Stevens’ poetry can be read just because it is exquisitely beautiful. He lavished details all over almost every poem he wrote, and gave many of them the quality of a dream. His descriptions are simply written, but brilliantly laid out: “When my dream was near the moon/ The white folds of its gown/ Filled with yellow light.”

His style tends to be a bit on the ornate side - Stevens freely uses the more exotic terms - such as “opalescence,” “pendentives” and “muleteers” - wrapped up in complex verse, sometimes with a rhyme scheme and sometimes free-form. And lush detail is added to many of his poems, with descriptions of the moon, sun, plants and lighting, along with dazzling descriptions of the colours.

But his writing is more than beautiful. Stevens’ work often poses questions about death, life, religion, and art, taking the conventional and turning it on its head. His belief in the importance of his art is reflected in poems like “Not Ideas About The Thing, But The Thing Itself,” which ends with the portentous lines: “Surrounded by its choral rings/ Still far away. It was like/ A new knowledge of reality.”