Wallace Stevens

Alternating between ornamental flourish and philosophical contemplation, his work can seem impenetrable to casual readers. When a bewildered acquaintance once asked him to explain a poem, Stevens elliptically replied, “I don’t think you’d understand this unless you wrote it.” And yet, as Helen Vendler shows, there is so much more to Stevens than dexterous wordplay or oblique cogitations on the relationship between reality and imagination. In a meticulous reading of his shorter poems—“The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Snow Man,” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” among others—Vendler excavates the depth of human feeling beneath his rarefied surfaces. Vendler’s Stevens is, above all, a poet of desire and its disillusions. His choices of words, fastidious as they are, mark his attempt to find a form adequate to his over-acute experience of ordinary life events: the failure of a marriage, the death of a neighbor, or a simple walk through his Connecticut neighborhood. Beyond sensual desire, his most profound yearning is to capture in poetry what his nerves cannot help but register, to encapsulate a world that has “stopped revolving except in crystal.” Compiled from Vendler’s 1982 lectures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Words Chosen Out of Desire showcases a leading critic at the peak of her powers, one whose masterful reconstructions played no small part in cementing Stevens’s place in the canon of literary modernism.