Wallace Stevens' supreme fiction

Library Journal

Linking Stevens to developments in Romantic and Victorian poetry, Carroll writes a kind of dialectical criticism showing how the poet moved from an earth-centered poetry to the ``pure poetry'' of his later years when he made a ``definitive mythic formulation of the supreme fiction.'' Basing his arguments on Stevens's letters and on the work of such critics as Frank Doggett, Joseph Riddell, and Roy Harvey Pearce, Carroll emphasizes the antitheses in Stevens's creative lifeand their ultimate resolution in such poems as ``The Owl in the Sarcophagus.'' Carroll is a supreme explicator and commentator. A significant addition to Stevens studies, required for all larger collections. Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill.