This dazzling book is at once an indispensable guide to Stevens's poetic canon and a significant addition to the literature on the American Romantic movement. It gives authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences of Stevens and deals at length with the important shorter works as well, showing their complex relations both to one another and to the work of Stevens's precursors, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, and Whitman. No other book on Stevens is as ambitious or comprehensive as this one: everyone who writes on Stevens will have to take it into account. The product of twenty years of meditating, thinking, and writing about Stevens, this truly remarkable book is a brilliant extension of Bloom's theories of literary interpretation.
