Wallace Stevens: A Literary Life

Details about Stevens's education, professional life, acquaintances and family life--from sources including Stevens's extensive journals and elliptical letters and from previous biographies--are plentiful here. But the poems themselves, as in the last line of ""The Snow Man,"" warn of ""nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"" when attempting to link reality to the products of the imagination. In this biography's first hundred pages, Sharpe, head of the department of English at Lancaster University, indirectly exposes these difficulties in zealous shuttling between cultural contexts (""suggestive parallels"" in modernism in visual arts, the startup of little magazines, Pound and Eliot's aesthetics) and Stevens's personal quirks (his ""resourceful destitution"" and ""reclusive predilections""). Sharpe finally and more concretely discovers terra firma in the Stevens of the late 1930s and early '40s, whose more prolific output of poetry and prose urgently returns repeatedly to poetry's relation to reality: ""His role, in short, is to help people live their lives."" Still, what is eerily lacking here is a sense of the poems; very few quotations or discussions exist, except briefly of ""Sunday Morning"" and ""Anecdote of the Jar"" and occasional glimpses of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. If, for Stevens, poetry is a ""special kind of thinking,"" Joan Richardson's two-volume set of psychological and philosophical investigation remains the standard. (Dec.)