from: "American Literature: Twentieth Century" by Henry Claridge and Janet
Goodwyn - a brief review of Wallace Stevens and the Actual World
The Year's Work in English Studies
volume 72 (1991)
"American Literature: Twentieth Century"
Henry Claridge and Janet Goodwyn
p. 478-79
Alan Filreis in Wallace Stevens and the Actual World offers a
much needed contextualization for Stevens's poetry primarily in the years
1939 to 1945, a useful complement to the letters of this period. He
revalues Stevens's engagement with the war poem business and the cultural
politics of its production, but, most significantly, he traces the effect
of the Mesures connection. Stevens was a subscriber and contributor to
the literary magazine run by Henry Church in Paris before the war. The fate
of Mesures and its contributors became, for Stevens, an index of the
survival of European culture. Jean Wahl, a Mesures writer and
concentration camp survivor who escaped to America, invited Stevens to his
Mount Holyoke Conference in 1943. Filreis's meticulous effort of historical
recovery is at its finest in this section; he gets to the heart of the
occasion and gives us the resonances of the address and the poetry which it
inspired. The distinction of this book lies not only in its painstaking
research, a veritable web of cross-reference, but also in its well-judged
and never over-stated assessment of the degree and range of Stevens's
concerns in this period.
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Document URL:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/goodwyn-review.html
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modified: Friday, 29-Nov-1996 23:39:25 EST