Corrections to the Library of America Edition of Stevens’s Poetry

Abstract

Corrections to the Library of America Edition of Stevens’s Poetry John N. Serio WALLACE STEVENS was lucky to have Alfred A. Knopf as his publisher. Despite the limited sales of Harmonium in 1923 and the early reviews labeling Stevens as an aesthete and a dandy, Knopf reissued Harmonium in a slightly expanded edition in 1931.1 Then, starting with Ideas of Order in 1936, book after book followed in fairly short order: The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems (1937); Parts of a World (1942); Transport to Summer (1947); The Auroras of Autumn (1950); and The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951). Between 1950 and 1953, Knopf reissued all of the previously published poetry volumes and in 1954 published The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. But Knopf did not stop there. Soon after Stevens’s death in 1955, the firm published Opus Posthumous (1957) and, under various imprints, continued to keep Stevens in the public eye: Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966); The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play (1971); Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens (1977); Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered; An Oral Biography (1977); Opus Posthumous: Revised, Enlarged, and Corrected Edition (1989); Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems (2009); and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: Corrected Edition (2015). It goes without saying that Knopf contributed significantly to Stevens’s reputation as one of America’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Yet, as the two above-cited “corrected” editions indicate, Stevens was not always well served by his publisher. Milton J. Bates expanded considerably Opus Posthumous by adding uncollected pieces, full sequences, and the more recently discovered typescript of “From the Journal of Crispin.” But he also silently corrected misspellings and errors (OP 1989 v-vii). In Chris Beyers and my own corrected edition of The Collected Poems, we rectified well over a hundred mistakes, which had been the result of rushing the book into print to meet the October 2, 1954, deadline that marked the occasion of Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday.2 For the texts of The Collected Poems, Knopf relied on the previously published individual volumes, and thus errors in those books persisted in The Collected Poems. Although the [End Page 1] first publication of “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” in Harmonium (1923) had the correct line order in section VIII, The Collected Poems used the revised 1931 edition, which had transposed lines 7 and 9. Slight mistakes in typing led to the errors of “Pack the heart” instead of “Peck the heart” in “The Man on the Dump” in Parts of a World (PW 24; CP 203), a comma instead of a period after “absolute” in line 13 of “Crude Foyer” (TS 27; CP 305), and “hollowed out of hollow-bright” instead of “hallowed out of hollow-bright” in “Description Without Place” in Transport to Summer (TS 76; CP 345). Whole lines were dropped in “Autumn Refrain” and “Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is,” as they were skipped in Ideas of Order and Parts of a World, respectively. Typographical errors not found in the original books crept into the collected volume as well. In “The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage,” “scrurry” appears instead of “scurry” (CP 6); in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” “if,” in the line “Which was, and if, chief motive” (CP 34), occurs instead of “is”; in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” the incomplete sentence of “Take from the dresser of deal” (CP 64) ends with a period instead of a comma; and in “Stars at Tallapoosa,” the line “There is no moon, on single, silvered leaf” (CP 71) should have been “There is no moon, no single, silvered leaf.” All were correct in Harmonium (18; 55; 95; 106). In “Farewell to Florida,” the line “The trees likes bones” (CP 118) should have been “The trees like bones,” as it was in Ideas of Order (4). In “The Good Man Has No Shape,” “Sour wine to warn him” (CP 364) should have been “Sour wine to warm him,” as in Transport to Summer (96). In “The Auroras of Autumn,” a comma appears instead of a...