The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

Mariani, a literary biographer (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and an English professor at Boston College, examines, insightfully but laboriously, the life and work of Wallace Stevens. Mariani views Stevens as one of the 20th century’s most important poets, but acknowledges he remains an unfamiliar figure compared to contemporaries Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. (Mariani also notes that Stevens called Eliot’s 1922 masterwork, The Waste Land, a bore.) Going from Stevens’s roots in Reading, Pa., to his time in Greenwich Village; Key West, Fla.; and Hartford, Conn., Mariani traces the path of an enigmatic author who was both a poet and an insurance executive, and who published his first collection, Harmonium, in 1923, when he was 44. In Mariani’s view, Stevens’s blend of radical modernism and individual conservativism added to the allure of his work. Mariani speculates on Stevens’s sometimes difficult, contrary nature and on his lifelong search for meaning and the sublime. While Mariani’s critical capacities prove strong in this finely wrought analysis, his dense, impressionistic, often florid language can make the going difficult. [em]Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim and Williams. (Apr.) [/em]