The Whole Harmonium

November 23, 2015
Mariani, a literary biographer (Gerard Manley Hopkins) and an English professor at Boston College, examines, insightfully but laboriously, the life and work of Wallace Stevens. Mariani views Stevens as one of the 20th century’s most important poets, but acknowledges he remains an unfamiliar figure compared to contemporaries Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot. (Mariani also notes that Stevens called Eliot’s 1922 masterwork, The Waste Land, a bore.) Going from Stevens’s roots in Reading, Pa., to his time in Greenwich Village; Key West, Fla.; and Hartford, Conn., Mariani traces the path of an enigmatic author who was both a poet and an insurance executive, and who published his first collection, Harmonium, in 1923, when he was 44. In Mariani’s view, Stevens’s blend of radical modernism and individual conservativism added to the allure of his work. Mariani speculates on Stevens’s sometimes difficult, contrary nature and on his lifelong search for meaning and the sublime. While Mariani’s critical capacities prove strong in this finely wrought analysis, his dense, impressionistic, often florid language can make the going difficult. Agent: Jill Kneerim, Kneerim and Williams.

January 1, 2016

After celebrated biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and John Berryman, this life of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) cements poet and biographer Mariani's role as the James Boswell of our age. It is beautifully written; a compelling vision of one of the 20th-century's greatest and most enigmatic literary figures: Stevens, the insurance executive and poet. Mariani's great strength is evoking the period and placing Stevens's verbal gymnastics within their proper literary/hagiographic context. Detailing the tension between Stevens the man and Stevens the poet, Mariani makes the modernist epoch come to life. A roll call of 20th-century literary and artistic luminaries fills the pages. Mariani weaves skillfully many strands, creating a biography that is both deliciously readable and profoundly knowledgeable. We glimpse the struggle Stevens experienced in trying to balance a serious career with his artistic pursuits. The story of his troubled marriage and on-and-off friendships with Williams, Marianne Moore, Harriet Monroe, et al, reveal an artist of icy solemnity and imaginative distance who employed strangely warm and sometimes surreal imagery to explore his own luminous "mind of winter." This is the Stevens biography for which poetry lovers have been waiting. VERDICT Brilliant; a must-have for all libraries with literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, 10/26/15.]--Herman Sutter, St. Agnes Acad., Houston

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