"A landmark work of scholarly and editorial imagination. In this probing, often dazzling, and clearly transformative volume, we encounter a Stevens whose reverberant afterlives are many, various, and complex. In its ambition and its willingness to embrace discrepancy and disjunction, this volume breaks new ground for hearing and counter-hearing Stevens into the 21st century. Whether resonating in England or unremarked in Czechoslovakia; a disaster for American poetry or its richest resource; surrealist, symbolist, or ordinary; embraced or critiqued, assimilated or expelled: Stevens emerges as a vibrant, paradoxical, protean force in 20th and 21st century poetics. This book will appeal to anyone interested in Stevens, in the ghostlier as well as keener demarcations of his legacy, and in the legacy of Modernism tout court.+?Maureen McLane, Professor of English, New York University, USA, and author of My Poets
This collection features established Stevens scholars writing about Stevens's influence on later poets, but it is not a systematic study of 20th-century poetry. Yet Eeckhout and Goldfarb's approach yields some rewards: a more conventional history would hardly consider Seamus Heaney as a vehicle of Stevensian influence, but George Lensing does that in his contribution and finds that, despite their differing attitudes towards abstraction, Stevens and Heaney had a shared sense of peace and harmony. Lisa Steinman takes one from unlikely readers of Stevens to unanticipated readers in her discussion of African American poet C. S. Giscombe, whose work unearths implications of Stevens not contemplated by the poet himself or his initial readers. Few poets today would deliberately style themselves as Stevensian, yet, as Rachel Malkin shows in her essay on Robert Hass, even "an esthetic of the ordinary+? is haunted by Stevens's reflexive modernism ... Charles Altieri's essay on Stevens and John Ashbery is scholarly and magisterial. And in fact most of the essays operate to convince the reader that-as Goldfarb puts it in her contribution, "Stevens' Musical Legacy: 'The Huge, High Harmony'"-there is "a vibrancy that is palpable in the work of ... many contemporary poets." Summing Up: Recommended.CHOICE
This stimulating collection of essays shows how, far from being a 'silent man, ' Stevens has been part of a 'continual conversation' with later American poetry: in doing this, it extends our sense of Stevens as well as of the more contemporary poetic scene. Roethke paid him the tribute, 'Brother, he's our father!', but contributors to this book suggest that, both approvingly and adversarially, his work has also engaged the sisterhood. These essays significantly enlarge our understanding of Stevens, his successors, and models of literary influence.Tony Sharpe, Senior Lecturer in English, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life