This morning's NEW YORK TIMES features a review of the new Wallace Stevens Selected Poems by Professor Vendler.
Speaking of the poems in Stevens's first volume, Vendler has this to say:
"Harmonium contains one of the saddest of Stevens's poems, 'The Snow Man,' in which a man realizes that he must make something of a permanently wintry world of ice, snow, evergreens and wind, attempting to see 'nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.'"
To which I can only respond, "have you read the poem?!"
3 comments:
Which only goes to underscore the general contempt for poetry by the Times...
she only wrote two books about Stevens,
so i guess that disqualifies her, hunh?
I'm not at all sure how to read this second comment -- I have, of course, read her books on Stevens as well as her other writings on Stevens -- I read ON EXTENDED WINGS back when it first came out -- The number of books someone has written and published on a subject doesn't have a whole lot to do with assessing the judgment of this particular poem -- Did you find it to be a sad poem?
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