Private Amusement or Public Salvation? The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Susan B. Weston. Wallace Stevens, An Introduction to His Poetry. Sew York: Columbia University Press, 1977. 151 + xix pp. Lucy Beckett. Wallace Stevens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, rptd. 1977. 222 pp. Books in Print now lists eighteen books titled Wallace Stevens. The two under consideration here claim that his poems reward us for remarkably different reasons. Read them, Susan Weston says, and we "find the world robed in the imagination's sequined harmonies" and "ourselves, robing and disrobing the world." Lucy Beckett hopes that the example of Stevens' progress toward some absolute will help to save "the modern world" from the chaotic barbarism left by the collapse of religion. Both books uncritically repeat Stevens' own assumptions about his language

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