Early 20th century
The initial reception of Stevens's poetry followed the publication of his first collection of poems, Harmonium, in the early 1920s. Comments on the poems were made by fellow poets and a small number of critics including William Carlos Williams and Hi Simons.[44] In her book on Stevens's poetry, Helen Vendler writes that much of the early reception of his poems was oriented to symbolic reading of them, often using simple substitution of metaphors and imagery for their asserted equivalents in meaning. For Vendler, this method of reception and interpretation was often limited in its usefulness and would eventually be replaced by more effective forms of literary evaluation and review.[46]
Late 20th century
After Stevens's death in 1955, the literary interpretation of his poetry and critical essays began to flourish with full-length books written about his poems by such prominent literary scholars as Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler's two books on Stevens's poetry distinguished his short poems and his long poems and suggested that they be considered under separate forms of literary interpretation and critique. Her studies of the longer poems are in her book On Extended Wings and lists Stevens's longer poems as including The Comedian as the Letter C, Sunday Morning, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery, Owl's Clover, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Esthetique du Mal, Description without Place, Credences of Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, and his last and longest poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.[46][47] Another full-length study of Stevens's poetry in the late 20th century is Daniel Fuchs's The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens.[48]
Early 21st century
Interest in the reading and reception of Stevens's poetry continues into the early 21st century with a full volume dedicated in the Library of America to his collected writings and poetry. In his book on the reading of Stevens as a poet of what he calls "philosophical poetry", Charles Altieri presents his own reading of such philosophers as Hegel and Wittgenstein while presenting a speculative interpretation of Stevens under this approach.[49] In his 2016 book Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Simon Critchley indicates a refinement of the appreciation of the interaction of reality and poetry in Stevens's poems, writing: "Steven's late poems stubbornly show how the mind cannot seize hold of the ultimate nature of reality that faces it. Reality retreats before the imagination that shapes and orders it. Poetry is therefore the experience of failure. As Stevens puts it in a famous late poem, the poet gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself."[50]
