Discussed in this essay:

The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, by Paul Mariani. Simon & Schuster. 496 pages. $30.

The poetry of Wallace Stevens provides one of the richest accounts in literature of what it feels like, over time, to be left alone with one’s mind. Stevens is a poet of intellectualized feeling and compassionate intellection; his poems are driven by what he feels about what he thinks, a state of consuming alertness to the contents of his mind that feeds our own alertness as we read him. He is the foremost American poet of silent reading,…