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[...]this article looks at some moments drawn from Vendler's arguably more public pronouncements, as in her interviews, non-specialist articles, or public lectures rather than her well-known expositions of Stevens in book form. [...]becoming the voice of a poem and then introducing to a critical audience what it means for at least one particular reader to become the voice of, say, a Stevens poem brings Vendler far closer to an intimate notion of fidelity to the text than the much bandied-about term \"close reading\" suggests. Interestingly, Vendler begins to adopt terms in this interview that Stevens himself investigated and that arise, in Vendler's case, from being quizzed about the very question of identity and how this may relate to literary education: INTERVIEWER How do you feel about identity-markers in the teaching of literature today: black studies, gay studies, women's studies, and the criticism built up around them? VENDLER I was never solely drawn to writing about women authors, chiefly because there weren't that many vivid writers of poetry who were women. [...]if we reread \"Asides on the Oboe\" and consider the poem in tandem with the Henri Cole interview, we can easily see how Stevens' words and reflections inform Vendler's critical understanding of the functions of lyric poetry:

Who can say what \"romanticism\" is? (\"On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,\" that famous article by A. O. Lovejoy, was a desperate attempt to bring some clarity to the concept, and has had no effect.) I can't see fitting Yeats, Frost, Stevens, Pound, Auden, etc. under any one label. Stevens can be linked to the Great Depression, and to the Second World War, but the work of interpretation of the poems that advert to such events is not aided by pointing out the presence of such events: it is too gross a sieve for the work of poetry. A single-author society has perhaps less effect than a journal, but for convivial people there are MLA meetings of the various societies which can bring far-flung scholars and critics face to face. \"Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane, honey of roses,\" said Herbert in his praise of English; this, too, Stevens (like other gifted poets) makes us feel-a form of sweetness, as if English has been enchanted to a level spoken by Stevens' angel of reality, making every word a node of brilliance and satisfaction.

(On rereading The Long Poems, I came to the conclusion that the book was a conscious-or, to be more Bloomian about it, perhaps an unconscious-effort to swerve around Vendler.) I reread Milton Bates's Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985), working hard to recall in detail a time when serious scholarly use of intellectual biography as could be gleaned from the archive-in particular, the unpublished letters then fairly recently available at the Huntington Library-was fresh and perhaps a bit daring, a moment when this approach could be met without knowledgeable preconception. (563) The key here, I believe, is to discern whether affirmation of experimentalism is meant as a rejoinder-maybe even, indeed, a sop-to those who would focus on the \"fallible\" Stevens committing \"errors\" of sex, class, and ideology (a belated final jab at Perloff, whose essay recites evidence of Stevens' anti-Semitism and apparent friendliness toward fascism), or if, on the other hand, heroic commitment to linguistic and formal experiment could or should stand as a poetic value whether one rejects or accepts concerns such as those raised by Davidson, Perloff, and others. Vendler's gesture of recommending Bates and thus the historical, biographical, intellectual, and even the political reading-in the same review where she deemed Perloff's \"rancorous commentary\" equivalent \"essentially [to] the stale, old criticism of Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson-that they did not write about the Napoleonic Wars or the Civil War\" (553) and lambasted Davidson's \"Marxist diction\" (552) as governing his view that \"Stevens' critical function stops... at the border of institutions and ideologies\" (Davidson 157, qtd. in Vendler 552)-actually, it turns out, did signify something of an opening of the field, as did, too, the carefully worded yet ringing endorsement of experimentalism, so that what we would still have to do, in the second half of the 1980s and in the '90s, was begin to define and then debate what \"experiment\" in Stevens' complicated case meant, and how experiment stood with or against postmodemity and the ideology of the modernist lyric. Is it the Pound Era, or the Stevens Era?) Vendler's response to Perloff's sense of \"the impasse of the modernist lyric\" during World War II was pointedly not to disagree about Stevens' anti-Semitism, but to lament the structure of Perloff's critical method for its socio-historical contextualizing-a list with dates, for example, of horrendous events taking place in Europe while Stevens obliviously went about his mundane work as insurance executive and poet.

When I sent her essay to potential contributors to serve as a model, one responded, no doubt as a backhanded compliment, \"If this is what we're supposed to do, I might as well be teaching auto mechanics.\" [...]convinced is Vendler that poetry is art, and not something else, that smack in the middle of the rage for theory in the 1980s she published Words Chosen Out of Desire, a landmark study that serves as a corrective to misreadings of Stevens as aloof, cerebral, and impersonal. Calling Stevens a second-order poet (for he reveals the intensity of first-order experience by finding a symbol adequate to its passion), she exposes the rawness of hurt, the despair of disappointment, or the occasional ecstasy of desire that pulsates beneath the surface.

[...]Vendler suggests that we must listen carefully to the music of Stevens' verse, its thinking through the materiality of its medium, to fully appreciate how his poems engage us in the experience of our own humanity. Books and landmark articles by Richard Hogg and C. B. McCully, Bmce Hayes, and others proposed mies and representations for the assignment of stress in ordinary language based upon hierarchical structures.1 At the same time, these linguistic theories gave rise to comparable approaches to poetic rhythm and meter, bringing finer lenses to bear upon the kinds of modulation that are central to our perceptual experience of Stevens' verse. Minda Rae Amiran's essay in this volume beautifully casts for us the attitudes of the English Department at Harvard, as Vendler probably experienced it, with what was then a conventional, or even parochial, definition of scholarship as \"information about literature that one might discover by diligent research and put in annotated editions\" rather than \"attention to any poem or play as a whole, its structure or strategies of emotional effect, and also any detailed sense of the poet's development as a craftsman\" (140,141). (CPP 223) What might be for another poet a Platonic figure, a pure image or projection that captivates the imagination, is for Stevens a rhythm, that is, an attention to movement and variation, to the ever-shifting temporal and spatial relationships between things (mind and its figurations, hand, candle, and wall; bed, books, chair, moving nuns, etc.).

Stevens pauses much more than we might expect from reading his printed texts, his delivery designed to clarify, to help us understand, and thereby engage us without theatrics. Modem poetry like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, [must] speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. Stevens may be the most private of poets, yet when he reads (the recording of his Harvard reading is basically without commentary or explanation or personal anecdote) we sense his desire for us not only to hear, but to understand in an emotion as of two people, as of two emotions becoming one. A simple check in the online concordance reveals how much he associates poetry with voice, with speaking and listening; the lexicon of spoken word and aural communication is salient: speech (69), voice (77), say (134), said (82), speak (59), hear (44), heard (46), and so on.

On Extended Wings (1969), about Stevens' longer poems, remains-along with Harold Bloom's The Poems of Our Climate-a foundation for all serious later work. Since it is clear to anyone who studies Stevens what kind of work that book has done, I want to emphasize the contributions that Vendler has made, the work she has done for Stevens criticism, since then. Stevens' poems, being more abstract and more complicated than many other poems, solicit and reward more assiduous interpretation: she has recently written, on hearing a recording of Stevens himself reading part of \"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,\" \"I am surprised that he expected it to be understood by his audience-or perhaps he didn't\" (\"Voice\"). Think of the end of \"Crude Foyer,\" where that conclusion arrives as a kind of despair, where we are \"incapable / Of the least, minor, vital metaphor, content, / At last, there, when it turns out to be here\" (CPP 270); and think of it again as a good example of the process Vendler has taught us to find in Stevens generally, where ideas are not propositions that serve conclusions, but hypotheses that serve emotions, and that collide, dissolve, or morph into others according to a logic that is not propositional but experiential-I am tempted to say a logic of the soul. \"Criticism,\" Vendler writes in Poets Thinking, \"ought to infer from the text the emotional motivation that not only compelled a poet from silence into speech but also produced . . . the evolving inner form of the work of art\" (4-5). [...]this way of reading the poems as algebraic, or second-order, as requiring us to put ourselves in the poet's place, to assign values to the variables (that is, to assign our own life experiences as the causes or memories behind the emotions), is what permits her, and us, to see the person in the poems.

Identifying the authors of anonymous works in Tottel's Miscellany, listing the editions of any early publication, naming the events or persons referred to in satires, finding the provenance of a term in Chaucer's poetry, relating a poem by Coleridge to events in the author's life at the time-and, of course, adumbrating the influences on an author's work: these were the pursuits of serious students of literature and the stuff of classroom lectures by our professors. A Wallace Stevens Checklist and Bibliography of Stevens Criticism compiled by Samuel French Morse, Jackson Bryer, and Joseph Riddel in 1963 lists seven books solely devoted to Stevens, one collection of articles about Stevens, 71 discussions of Stevens in books on wider topics, 254 articles in journals, 14 dissertations, 252 book reviews, and 24 foreign investigations. [...]under world view they explained what Stevens had to say about mind and world, imagination and reality, and their relation to the hero and death. Because they pursued ideas, not poems, this approach led most of the critics to develop arguments bolstered by snippets from a variety of poems or essays throughout Stevens' work, rather than to what might be called an aesthetic examination of any one poem, though they occasionally chose a whole poem to paraphrase. Because Stevens is shy and defensive about his romantic ideas, according to Bloom, the poet-major man-appears in section X as vulnerable and old.