The Wallace Stevens Case Law and the Practice of Poetry

The book was a great help to me in thinking about Stevens--a poet whom I don't know as well as I'd like, whom I often don't understand, whom I've never been able to read much of at a time, and whose poems I've never been able to hear as the products of a single voice. Grey helps one see them as such products-particularly by telling you when he thinks the voice goes off key, as in the 'Major Man' poems. Thanks to Grey, I feel prepared to go back to Stevens's poems and to read them with fewer guards up, with less suspicion and more sympathy. The book sketches a convincing picture of Stevens's motives and conflicts. Its last chapter, 'The Colors of the Mind,' finishes off the sketch with bravura and conviction.