Presents Stevens' notebooks containing excerpts from his reading, his comments and aphorisms.

In a unique collection of essays devoted to one of America's most significant twentieth-century poets, a group of international contributors considers the Transatlantic nature of Stevens' poetry, providing original accounts of how a poet wary of 'influence' created a poetics which continues to haunt contermporary verse.

"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--

Bestselling author Baker, "who writes like no one else in America" ("Newsweek"), has assembled his best nonfiction writing over the last 15 years, a trove of original and provocative pieces.

Leon Surette's new study of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, The Modern Dilemma, challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase when Eliot and his bride shared Bertrand Russell's tiny London flat, and later rented a country house together (1914-17). Eliot's poetry of that time - up to The Waste Land is seen to reflect his Humanist phase, closed by his conversion, poetically documented in Ash Wednesday. Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious and philosophical angst, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. The Modern Dilemma challenges this view, demonstrating the seriousness of Stevens' life-long engagement with the modern dilemma of disbelief, and also that, like Eliot, he rejected the Humanist resolution, characterized by Russell in "The Free Man's Worship" as man worshiping "at the shrine that his own hands have built." The study proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets' responses in poetry and prose to the same texts and events: Marianne Moore's poetry; the Great War; Humanists and anti-Humanists; the Franco-Mexican Humanist, Ramon Fernandez; Pure Poetry; and finally the gathering war clouds in the late 'thirties. The strategy is to put the two men in juxtaposition so as to highlight the differences and similarities of their responses to the same issues or the same works. Among the issues under examination is the nature and status of poetry, religious belief or disbelief, and political engagement or the lack thereof.

Originally published in 1968. In The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, James Baird traces the process of Wallace Steven's Grand Poem and the total structure that it accomplished in language. In the words of Professor Baird, "The full art of Stevens is organized with architectural precision. The shape of the mind becomes a building, the framework of which is founded in a willed symmetry of design." In The Dome and the Rock, James Baird exposes the capacity of Wallace Stevens to design his poetry in a manner similar to an architect, and he "reveals the craftsmanship of [Wallace's] acts as builder."

-- New York Times Book Review