(For primary sources, see abbreviations I.)
Reference
(See also works cited under abbreviations II. There are reliable encyclopedias of philosophy, of religion and ethics, of Judaism, etc., for checking general or specific knowledge.)
Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms, 8th ed. Boston: Thomson, Wadsworth, 2005.
Bible (AV): the Authorized (King James) Version (1611). All quotations from the English Bible are from this translation, which was part of the common tongue for some 350 years. (The original Scriptures are the Hebrew Bible, which in Christendom becomes the Old Testament, and the Greek New Testament. For Roman Catholic Christendom, the Bible was known for centuries in its Latin [Vulgate] version.)
Edelstein, J. M., Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.
Fowler, Alastair, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Hollander, John, Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse. New Haven: Yale University Press, 3rd ed. 2001.
Morse, Samuel, Jackson R. Bryer, Joseph N. Riddel, Wallace Stevens Checklist and Bibliography of Stevens Criticism. Denver: Alan Swallow, 1963.
New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, ed. T.V.F. Brogan, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1994: essential excerpts from the NPEPP.
Serio, John N., Wallace Stevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
Walsh, Thomas F., comp., Concordance to the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press, 1963. (Entries for Opus Posthumous are keyed to the first edition, ed. Morse, 1957.)
Biography
See also below in Bates, Ellmann (in Doggett and Buttel), and Lensing.
Brazeau, Peter, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985: an oral “biography” from interviews with contemporaries, whose evidence requires the usual scrutiny.
Poggioli, Renato, trans., Mattino domenicale ed altre poesie. Torino: Giulo Einaudi Editore, 1954, pp. 168–85, letters by Stevens to the translator.
Richardson, Joan, Wallace Stevens: I: The Early Years, 1879–1923 and Wallace Stevens:
II: The Later Years, 1923–1955. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986 and 1988:beyond detailed biographical facts, especially valuable on Stevens’s reading.
Sharpe, Tony, Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Stevens, Holly, “Bits of Remembered Time,” Southern Review 7 (1971): 651–57; “Holidays in Reality,” in Doggett and Buttel, below, 105–13; for Souvenirs and Prophecies, see abbreviations I.
Brief List of Criticism
A few critical and scholarly works, some older and well-established, some more recent. There is a large amount of commentary on Stevens, of varying quality. Studies that are elementary or specialized are omitted here, as are most articles (see John Serio, above). Some of the best writing on poetry is to be found in the works cited in the appendix.
Bates, Milton, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Blackmur, R.P., “Examples of Wallace Stevens” and “Wallace Stevens: An Abstraction Blooded,” in his Form and Value in Modern Poetry. New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1957, pp. 183–212, 213–18.
Bloom, Harold, Wallace Stevens: Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976.
Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught, Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Cook, Eleanor, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988; in Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, chaps. 9, 12, 13 and passim.
Doggett, Frank, and Robert Buttel, eds., Wallace Stevens: A Celebration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (See Ellmann’s biographical essay, Hollander on Stevens and music, MacCaffrey on “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and Vendler on how Keats’s “To Autumn” echoes through Stevens’s work.)
Filreis, Alan, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991; Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Frye, Northrop, “Wallace Stevens and the Variation Form” in his Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.
Jarrell, Randall, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens” in his Poetry and the Age. New York: Noonday, 1953, pp. 133–48.
Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1960.
Lensing, George, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986; Wallace Stevens and the Seasons. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Litz, A. Walton, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Longenbach, James, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
MacLeod, Glen, Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: from the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Maeder, Beverley, Wallace Stevens’ Experimental Language: The Lion in the Lute. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Vendler, Helen Hennessy, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969; Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.