On Extended Wings

“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 repulsions, his sense of the world: all are integral to his style. And while Stevens’s short poems are perhaps his most anthologized, it is only in his longer works that we find his unique sensibilities on full display.

Tracing the great modernist’s development through fourteen poems, from “Sunday Morning” (1915) to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949), Helen Vendler reveals the longer poems as the proving grounds where Stevens tested formal innovations and discovered his own formidable strengths. Chief among these, she argues, is a gift for equivocation. Neither ascetic nor hedonist, neither solipsist aesthete nor engaged poet of the social, Stevens “trembles always at halfway points.” He departs from his romantic forbears, deprecating the pure imagination by letting flights of poetic fancy degenerate into intentional decadence and triviality. But he finds desperate clutching at “things as they are” equally fruitless: “endless struggle with fact” is the poet’s inevitable lot. From this ambivalence springs a whole world of grammatical and syntactic innovation, from his ambiguous use of tense to the welter of qualifications that seem to thwart every affirmative declaration.

An unsurpassed classic in the canon of Stevens criticism, On Extended Wings gives us the full sweep his of his oeuvre—from the somber to the whimsical, from high stoic elegy to grotesque comedy—as no one but the brilliant Helen Vendler can.