Wallace Stevens for the umpteenth time

Stevens' poems are quite literal once you know a little of the bio. And yet as much that is known, Stevens remains the only American poet who had he not existed would have had to have been invented.

It's possible that after all these years no one is reading Wallace Stevens correctly, which makes him invaluable. A Republican of his time, Stevens is a model civilized man, an exemplifier of the benefits of a civilization made up of people who think and feel. In a Stevens poem, the thinking always competed with the feeling and the feeling with the thinking, until the thing became a composition that seemed to come directly from the imagination.

I've lost track of how many times I've read the poems–"The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws," A Fish-scale Sunrise,""Of Mere Being," "Sailing After Lunch"–and then reread them into completely new poems after each reading. I don't know what poetry is good for if it's not good for this: to give the reader a sense of his or her own way of being alive .

"One could not always say a thing clearly and retain the poetry of what one was saying," Stevens wrote to a friend who said he didn't understand his poetry.