On Broken Wings

I finally found some time between 18 credits and three jobs to start reading On Extended Wings, the book Dr. Sexon gave me. The book focuses on fourteen of the longer poems that Stevens wrote over the span of thirty years. The author Helen Hennessy Vendler suggests that these poems deserve equal fame and consideration to his more popular, shorter works. Stevens central theme, the worth of the imagination remained with him throughout his entire life. Vendler suggest that his development as a poet can best be seen, not in description—which must be repetitive— of the abstract bases of his work, but rather in a view of his changing styles.

"Stevens was engaged in constant experimentation all his life in an attempt to find the appropriate vehicle for his expansive consciousness; he found it in his later poems, which surpass in value the rest of his work."

I'm looking forward to her analysis of his work and the deconstruction of his poems and how they compare to his shorter works in the harmonium.