On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems
[Vendler] has written a superb and badly needed book giving us readings unlikely to be surpassed of Stevens's longer poems...Mrs. Vendler is a commentator almost clairvoyant...Her book ought to be read, with care and gratitude, by every reader of Stevens, for no critic before her has understood so well his major poems. (Harold BloomNew York Times Book Review)This study of Stevens' long poems centers around problems defined by the poetry itself: its style and form, its evolving shape. In treating these problems intelligently, Mrs. Vendler deepens the exploration of Wallace Stevens into penetration. For this reason, among others,On Extended Wingsis valuable and special. (Richard GiannoneNation)[Vendler's] study of Stevens' longer poems is a difficult, brilliant book that everywhere illuminates not only the specific poems under inspection and Stevens' other work, but our ideas of poetry in general. Her own style, rising to its subject, is capacious and inventive, witty and astringent, intensely dedicated to distinguishing Stevens' finest poems, or moments in poems, from his less fine ones. The result is true criticism, and it comes through most vividly in her discussions of 'Man with the Blue Guitar,' 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,' and 'Auroras of Autumn.' A book to be read and reread, it is absolutely essential for the way it sends us back to the poems it so lovingly and sternly anatomizes. (Choice)