Choice Review
Well known as a Housman scholar, Leggett here offers an account of how Stevens's careful reading of I.A. Richards, Charles Mauron, Giambattista Vico, and Henri Focillon enriches the themes of his later verse. Though praising Vendler, Leggett challenges some interpretations and calls Bloom's misreadings powerful enough to inspire brilliant counterexegeses. Leggett finds that what attracted Stevens to Mauron was the idea that art rests in the present (``the aesthetic moment''), whereas life is always awaiting the future. Significant in this source-tracing is how the four theorists strengthened Stevens's growing tendency to externalize what he had previously located in the poet's sensibility. Based on how forms travel through the ``landscapes'' of centuries according to a metamorphic principle, Focillon's work gets the greatest credit for this shift; like Marianne Moore in ``The Pangolin,'' the French theorist regards the human being as combining smallness and heroic affirmation. Avoiding the overused imagination/reality dichotomy, Leggett is stimulating on ``The Auroras of Autumn,'' approving, with reservations, Donald Davie's 1954 explication of the father figure as ``cosmic Designer.'' Appropriate mainly for graduate students.-B. Quinn, formerly, College of Saint Teresa
Library Journal Review
Implicit in all Stevens's poetry is a ``metapoetry or self-conscious theory'' of poetry. This metapoetry has been the object of intense (and often contradictory) speculations by such important critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. To understand it better, Leggett studied Stevens's own heavily annotated copies of such works as I. A. Richards's Coleridge on Imagination and Charles Mauron's classic Aesthetics and Imagination. In his best chapter he applies Mauron's ideas to Stevens's major poem, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, concluding that the poet's ``distinct tongue'' is based on a theory of ``abstraction, decreation, and the first idea.'' An important new book for Stevens scholars and for students of aesthetics. Daniel L. Guillory, English Dept., Millikin Univ., Decatur, Ill. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
