An annotated bibliography of criticism about Wallace Stevens, 1972-1977.

Abstract

J. C. Edelstein's Wallace Stevens: A Descriptive Bibliography (1973) updated Wallace Stevens Checklist and Bibliography of Stevens Criticism (1963) by Samuel French Morse, Jackson R. Bryer, and Joseph N. Riddel. The cutoff date of materials for the Edelstein bibliography was 1971 for periodicals and 1972 for books. The purpose of the present thesis is to update further that bibliography. To that end all pertinent books, periodical articles, and dissertations for the years 1972 through 1977 have been cataloged and annotated. Chapter I summarizes the direction Stevens scholarship has taken during this six year period. Receiving the most attention during this six-year period were the areas of biography, content, technique, religion and myth, poetry as subject, Harmonium, individual poems, and influence, both philosophic and poetic, including the Symbolist and Romantic movements. No attempt has been made to draw conclusions from this study for such is not its purpose. However, Chapter I concludes with the presentation of the critical question of whether we need a new poet for America's new age. The yearly number of dissertations written was highest in 1972 and 1973, with the numbers declining since then. However, there was a significant growth of periodical articles in 1977--over double of those in most other years. This increase coincides with the first year of publication of the Wallace Stevens Journal. Included in this thesis are three appendices. The first lists works pertaining to Wallace Stevens' poetry published in languages other than English during 1972-77; the second lists articles that should have been annotated within the thesis but which were, for a variety of reasons, unobtainable, and the third is a table listing the number of dissertations and the total publications annotated for the years 1972-77.