Helen Vendler- "Wallace Stevens as an American Poet"

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Because Wallace Stevens appears less "American" than such poets as Frost or Williams, he has been read chiefly as an international modernist or as a poet with European affinities. Helen Vendler, using as examples poems that mention nothing American, will argue that American literary history needs to broaden its concept of what counts as American in American poetry.

Helen Vendler is the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard in the Department of English.