ESSENTIAL CRISPIN
Abstract
ESSENTIAL CRISPIN Wallace Stevens: Poetry and Criticism. By TIM MORRIS. Salt Publishing, 2006; £16.99. âWhy should we read Wallace Stevens today?â is proposed and answered by Tim Morris in this fresh evaluation of the major long poems. He is interested in understanding them through a variety of approaches: inï¬uences, biography, publication history, critical reception, and archival materials, with discussions of aesthetics and style that animate the entire undertaking. And so to the complementary question: how do we read Stevens today? The book is intended for those already familiar with Stevensâs poetry, with Morris encouraging us âto perhaps read more closely by tending to disagreeâ. With several texts of Stevensâs poetry to choose from, including paperback editions of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous and The Palm at the End of the Mind, Morris opts (primarily) for Collected Poems and Prose published by the Library of America in 1997. Since Morris pays close attention to various compositions of a poem, the reader welcomes his two-page note on the choice of text, though even the Library of America edition is not without error, as he points out with speciï¬c instances. The Collected Poems and Prose contains many notes