Reviewed by: Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside Edward Ragg Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside. Edited by John Burnside. London: Faber, 2008. When it comes to selected editions of Stevens' work, readers and scholars—especially outside the United States—have traditionally referred to the 1953 Selected Poems, published by Faber & Faber. This edition features poems chosen by Stevens himself and has been, historically, the first port of call for new readers of Stevens beyond North America. As documented by George Lensing, Carolyn Masel, and more recently Mark Ford, Stevens was, however, embroiled in discussions concerning a potential selected edition to be published in England as early as 1944. In 1952, R. A. Caton's Fortune Press finally published a selected edition, much to the chagrin of Knopf in New York (the book was subsequently withdrawn). Stevens' interest in the Fortune Press was aroused by his correspondence with the English poet Nicholas Moore as well as his acquaintance with Moore's father, the philosopher G. E. Moore. The elusive literary publisher Tambimuttu was also negotiating with Stevens during 1944-45 to produce one or more editions of his work, one of which was to have been a selection, as part of Tambimuttu's Editions Poetry London series (an offshoot of Poetry London magazine). What is perhaps most surprising is that Stevens ever consented to publish a selected edition of his work or even to capitulate to making the selections himself. The remaining correspondence amply shows Stevens' fear of being defined by such prosaically-titled publications as a Selected Poems or Collected Poems, for him chisel-marks on the epitaph of a poetic career. He characteristically refused to make the selections for the first proposed Fortune Press edition. When Faber approached Knopf about a selected edition in 1951, [End Page 284] Marianne Moore was touted to assemble the list. As an unpublished letter of November 1, 1951 from Knopf's Herbert Weinstock to Stevens shows, T. S. Eliot himself had suggested that either Marianne Moore make the selection or Stevens do so, with the Knopf camp urging Stevens to proceed. The Wallace Stevens Archive at the Huntington Library houses the volley of letters that ensued. On November 12, 1951, Stevens sent Weinstock his hand-written selection of titles, warning Weinstock that "It is not a list of things that are what 'the author wishes to preserve.' It should not be advertised that way; it is representative" (WAS 3333). Lovers of Stevens' work occasionally wonder why Harmonium is still the poet's best-known book, given the overall achievements of his poetic career. But in the fifty-eight poems Stevens selected himself, thirty-four of them are from Harmonium (if one includes the 1931 edition). Certainly, many of the Harmonium "lyrics" suit anthologizing, yet if the text is to be understood as "representative," then, for Stevens, these poems were significant manifestations of his work (the Harmonium-esque "Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain," from Transport to Summer, also made the cut). Of course, Stevens' selection also included "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," as well as a range of poems from all his published books to date. The only exception was "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," which had appeared in The Hudson Review but is now more widely recognized as part of the 1954 The Rock (first published in Stevens' Collected Poems). There have been other selected editions over the years, notably for the North American market and usually masterminded by Knopf. These range from Holly Stevens' important 1971 selection, The Palm at the End of the Mind, over Helen Vendler's smaller gathering in 1993 for Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, to, most extensively and now most attractively, the Selected Poems edited by John Serio in 2009. But whereas the latter will be familiar to all Stevens lovers, rather obscurer is a slim paperback entitled Wallace Stevens: Poems Selected by John Burnside published by Faber in 2008. It is, sadly, already out of print again and has been replaced by another reprint of the 1953 selection I have been revisiting in my opening paragraphs. The Scottish...
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Oct 17, 2023
Richard C Cornes + 4
Open Access
