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How to Live, What to Do: Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens
How to Live, What to Do is an indispensable introduction to and guide through the work of a poet equal in power and sensibility to Shakespeare and Milton. Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before.
Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.
Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.
- GenresPoetry
134 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 15, 2018
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 21, 2017
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This slim study is much more than what is blurbed and marketed by the publisher as a concise primer to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Instead, the greater primer is to simply read his work. And if his poems resound, or connect to you in any way, further study may be warranted and result in your seeking out this book. But to begin here would be a grave mistake.
It is not ‘how’ things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
Wallace Stevens is in the realm of American greats the like of Emily Dickinson. He too can make one’s head explode. He also makes sense.
Nonsense in grammatical form sounds half rational.
Stevens, through his poems, shaped a new language for us. He fashioned an instrument adequate in describing how to live and what to do in this strange new world of experience.
…’ditherings’ accompany each and every predication, the undertones and overtones of every color of the mind.
Steven’s ditherings see what was always seen but never seen before. Elicited as our necessary angel he offers individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet. Having read and studied everything Stevens wrote and even read himself, Joan Richardson provides an advanced course a scholar might take in discovering an even better way into the mind and work of Wallace Stevens. But this is not the book to initially begin with. Too much would be lost on the unspoiled and uninitiated among us.
By reading through Stevens’s body of work we learn to become pragmatists…
How refreshing it is to be practical, to see things as they are. And the mystery, and joy, in imagining what could be. When perceived as dogmatic one becomes a bore. Wallace Stevens opens us to a more expansive, and much wilder, world.
Finally, he (Stevens) noted,
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of words, helps us to live our lives…
Joan Richardson has produced for us a most distinctive and valuable tool in which to help us view the world through the eyes of Wallace Stevens. And in essence, Stevens provides us new glasses in which we may see for ourselves the possibilities that will always exist if we maintain the courage to keep looking.
Stevens’s poems are exercises in meditation, designed to loosen inherited, outworn habits of thought inappropriate to honoring the life of all things on the planet of which we are a part…
This slim study is much more than what is blurbed and marketed by the publisher as a concise primer to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Instead, the greater primer is to simply read his work. And if his poems resound, or connect to you in any way, further study may be warranted and result in your seeking out this book. But to begin here would be a grave mistake.
It is not ‘how’ things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
Wallace Stevens is in the realm of American greats the like of Emily Dickinson. He too can make one’s head explode. He also makes sense.
Nonsense in grammatical form sounds half rational.
Stevens, through his poems, shaped a new language for us. He fashioned an instrument adequate in describing how to live and what to do in this strange new world of experience.
…’ditherings’ accompany each and every predication, the undertones and overtones of every color of the mind.
Steven’s ditherings see what was always seen but never seen before. Elicited as our necessary angel he offers individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet. Having read and studied everything Stevens wrote and even read himself, Joan Richardson provides an advanced course a scholar might take in discovering an even better way into the mind and work of Wallace Stevens. But this is not the book to initially begin with. Too much would be lost on the unspoiled and uninitiated among us.
By reading through Stevens’s body of work we learn to become pragmatists…
How refreshing it is to be practical, to see things as they are. And the mystery, and joy, in imagining what could be. When perceived as dogmatic one becomes a bore. Wallace Stevens opens us to a more expansive, and much wilder, world.
Finally, he (Stevens) noted,
It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of words, helps us to live our lives…
Joan Richardson has produced for us a most distinctive and valuable tool in which to help us view the world through the eyes of Wallace Stevens. And in essence, Stevens provides us new glasses in which we may see for ourselves the possibilities that will always exist if we maintain the courage to keep looking.
Stevens’s poems are exercises in meditation, designed to loosen inherited, outworn habits of thought inappropriate to honoring the life of all things on the planet of which we are a part…
August 22, 2018
5 stars specifically for fans of Wallace Stevens -- might not be quite as exciting if you're not... Still, a wonderful little book.
September 29, 2018
An admiring look at Wallace Stevens by a professor who has devoted much of her career to him.
If you stick with it, you will find it helpful to what made Stevens tick, why he wrote the way the wrote, and how you might look at the poems in order to understand him -- and them.
Someday someone will write a look at Stevens' poems and confer upon them the inviting deliciousness of Key Lime pie -- which is what you find when you read him.
If you stick with it, you will find it helpful to what made Stevens tick, why he wrote the way the wrote, and how you might look at the poems in order to understand him -- and them.
Someday someone will write a look at Stevens' poems and confer upon them the inviting deliciousness of Key Lime pie -- which is what you find when you read him.
December 17, 2021
This was a re-read for me: Finished the book on December 3, 2021 and immediately started reading it again. Overall, would recommend for anyone interested in Wallace Stevens. Presents substantiated observations on such questions as why Stevens wrote, what he viewed as the role of poetry in the world, how best to cope with the modern world, etc. The book presents these observations in ways that helpfully supplement what the poet himself had to say on such matters in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination.
One drawback of the book, however, are its somewhat frequent, excessively long, run-on sentences, punctuated only by numerous parentheticals and sub-clauses. At times, for me, these departures completely halted the otherwise excellent flow of observations in a given Chapter. Similarly, the same style often makes suspect or imprecise use of quotes or references. At times I would find myself surprised by a description from Stevens, only to find, via a footnote, that the words quoted were not Stevens' at all. Other compelling quotes or references do not lead to a footnote. Many footnotes reference other books by the same author. These drawbacks made the benefits the book provides a somewhat uneven mixture for me.
How to Live, What to Do benefits from Joan Richardson's many years of immersion in Stevens's work. The author produces many moments of penetrating beauty and clarity in her observations of Stevens. For this reason, I would have appreciated more of the excellent analysis and scholarship the book contains and less of its devotion.
One drawback of the book, however, are its somewhat frequent, excessively long, run-on sentences, punctuated only by numerous parentheticals and sub-clauses. At times, for me, these departures completely halted the otherwise excellent flow of observations in a given Chapter. Similarly, the same style often makes suspect or imprecise use of quotes or references. At times I would find myself surprised by a description from Stevens, only to find, via a footnote, that the words quoted were not Stevens' at all. Other compelling quotes or references do not lead to a footnote. Many footnotes reference other books by the same author. These drawbacks made the benefits the book provides a somewhat uneven mixture for me.
How to Live, What to Do benefits from Joan Richardson's many years of immersion in Stevens's work. The author produces many moments of penetrating beauty and clarity in her observations of Stevens. For this reason, I would have appreciated more of the excellent analysis and scholarship the book contains and less of its devotion.
May 31, 2018
This is not a fast read as I had to keep putting it down to think about what Ms Richardson was saying. She is an expert in Stevens poetry, but you don't have to be, to enjoy this book. The author brings in Wittgenstein, Bergson, William James, Schopenhauer, Emerson and many more but the learning is worn lightly and the narrative is always on topic. Stevens comes across as a fascinating man.
"The slightest sound matters," Stevens wrote. "The most momentary rhythm matters... You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound and you do in fact know, without knowing how..."
"Stevens left the city almost every Sunday and walked into the New Jersey countryside, sometimes covering up to forty miles by the time he returned to his apartment in the early evening."
The book covers the man, the inspirations, the poetry and the impact he had on others. But it is always accessible and recommended if you like poetry and how it is created.
I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.
"The slightest sound matters," Stevens wrote. "The most momentary rhythm matters... You have somehow to know the sound that is the exact sound and you do in fact know, without knowing how..."
"Stevens left the city almost every Sunday and walked into the New Jersey countryside, sometimes covering up to forty miles by the time he returned to his apartment in the early evening."
The book covers the man, the inspirations, the poetry and the impact he had on others. But it is always accessible and recommended if you like poetry and how it is created.
I was given a copy of this book by Netgalley in return for an honest review.
May 27, 2021
This is not light reading, even as far as literary criticism goes. Had to dust of the cobwebs from what I learned about the language that scholars use to speak of poetry and poetics. Speaks of Wallace's philosophical education--William James, Jonathan Edwards, and Emerson. Some abstract (for me) discussions of science and photography and language in how it all relates to Wallace's worldview and how it influenced his poetry. About halfway through this short, but dense work. Reading Wallace's poetry more satisfying and concrete.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews