Concordance to the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

This is the first concordance to all of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Based on his poems as they appear in The Collected Poems, The Necessary Angel, and Opus Posthumous, it contains nearly 50,000 quotations illustrating more than 15,000 word usages. An invaluable reference book for all Stevens scholars.

The need for such a book has become increasingly apparent as Steven's reputation has grown. Although the many critical studies of Stevens published during the last ten years have greatly aided in the general appreciation of his work, there is still much more to be done in the detailed analyses of individual poems.

Stevens is not only a great poet but a difficult one. The nature of the difficulty lies in the complex, ever-enlarging symbolism and the dramatis personae which he employs and of which the reader must be constantly aware. The abstractness felt in much of his later poetry is partly in the mind of the reader who fails to perceive the complexity and to feel the weight of meaning borne by the symbols and characters that live in the poets mythology. A full examination of this mythology requires a very extensive study of the individual images, symbols, and figures that have recurred and grown from poem to poem in the more than forty years of Stevens's career. This concordance will make such a full examination possible and will help the reader to comprehend more easily each "unfamiliar, difficult fern" which opens out from "the furiously burning father-fire."