TY - JOUR
AU - Stubbs, Tara
AB - REVIEWS 525 In the title essay, ‘Mr and Mrs Stevens’, the given book for review transforms from chance commission into a point of illuminating vantage, as the letters of Wallace Stevens to his wife Elsie cast a light which throws his major poems into sharp relief. The unhappiness of the marriage, and the dogged bad grace with which both parties seem to have conducted it, free the poet, in Ford’s reading, to consort with his ‘interior paramour’ and to ‘take over [Elsie’s] boredom and loneliness and forms of self-communion and make them his own’ (p. 65). As well as lending its title to the whole collection, this essay also shares that title with the delightful cover illustration by Brian Sayers, which pictures the elderly Wally and Elsie in a stiffly posed snapshot, while the poet’s fantastical words irrupt into the picture around them: ‘let be be finale of seem’. The aptness of the illustration, both for Stevens’s life and for Ford’s collection, suggests a close affinity between poet–critic and artist (whose work adorned the cover of Ford’s previous book of essays, A Driftwood Altar)—an affinity which is most appropriate, in a collection which elsewhere celebrates the creative friendship between 
TI - Clare Hutton and Patrick Walsh (eds.). The Oxford History of the Irish Book, Volume V: The Irish Book in English, 18912000.
JF - The Review of English Studies
DO - 10.1093/res/hgr150
DA - 2012-06-16
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/clare-hutton-and-patrick-walsh-eds-the-oxford-history-of-the-irish-L32D2sFqlr
SP - 525
EP - 527
VL - 63
IS - 260
DP - DeepDyve
ER -