Ideas of Order.

Notes

First and limited edition, signed by Stevens; this one of just 10 copies for review and marked "out of series", from a total edition of 165.

An excellent association copy: with the pencilled ownership inscription of F. O. Matthiessen on the front free endpaper and some pencilled underlings and occasional marginal notation. F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950) was an early champion of Stevens and "one of the finest scholar-critics of his generation who spent most of his teaching career at Harvard. His most notable works include The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (1935), Henry James: The Major Phase (1944) and The James Family (1947), though perhaps his masterpiece is American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)" (Charles Doyle, ed., Wallace Stevens: The Critical Heritage, 1997, p. 147). Ideas of Order, Stevens's second book following Harmonium of 1923, was reviewed favourably by Matthiessen in The Yale Review for March 1936, under the headline "Society and Solitude in Poetry" (see Edlestein K256), commenting: "his poems do not make statements about life; they create for the reader an illusion of sharing in a complete experience". In April 1947 Matthiessen also wrote an appreciation, for The New York Times Book Review, entitled "Wallace Stevens at 67".