Review by Booklist Review
Wallace Stevens represents an idea: the idea of an American poet equal in intelligence and culture to anything Europe could throw this way. What Paul Valery might have been if he'd not been born in France. Well, here he is: big, powerful, sometimes masterful, sometimes merely boring. This is an updated version of the 1957 companion to the Collected Poems--bits and pieces of poetry, addresses, prose, and drama that never got published. One thing Stevens never suffered from, apparently, was the need to be understood (in any sense of the expression)--a circumstance that either impresses or frustrates his potential readers. Some background notes included. Recommended for larger public libraries or those with active literature collections. --Stuart Whitwell
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Intended as a companion volume to Stevens's Collected Poems , the Opus Posthumous miscellany (first issued in 1957) contains some of his deepest poetic ruminations on the imagination and the limits of knowledge, along with many verses that seem like metaphysical doodles, mere dress rehearsals for larger poems. The book also includes three philosophical playlets, notes on Stevens's poetry, plus essays on diverse themes: living in Connecticut, the irrational in poetry, Raoul Dufy's lithographs, reading T. S. Eliot to stay young, etc. Original to this revised edition is a wonderful batch of first-rate aphorisms (e.g., ``All poetry is experimental poetry''). Among the newly added poems, the standout is ``Carnet de Voyage'' (1914), an early sequence in which Stevens tentatively sounded his mature themes. Previously uncollected essays and jottings include jejune scribbling on the insurance industry and oracular pronouncements in the form of Stevens's replies to questionnaires sent by Partisan Review and other magazines. Bates is the author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Originally published in 1957, under the editorship of Samuel French Morse, Opus Posthumous was designed as a companion to Stevens's Collected Poems (1954), offering the reader various fugitive pieces not appearing in book form. This new edition by Stevens scholar Bates contains 48 items that have never been previously published--or that appear here in a radically new form. These new items include poetry, drama, aphorisms, essays, and even responses to questionnaires. Thus, Bates's edition of Opus Posthumous represents a significant addition to the Stevens canon, one that restores the unofficial poet ``who engages today's biographers and historians.'' To read the beautiful pages of this book is to understand why ``poetry is a means of redemption.'' Required of all larger poetry collections.-- Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
