I've just received a copy of John Burnside's new Faber selection of Stevens in the Poet-to Poet series. Flicking through it to see what he had chosen, I noticed that the second-to-last poem in the book is 'Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself'. It's one of my favourite poems, and I immediately reread it. To my astonishment, I found it's completely different from the version I know. After the first two tercets, it goes off into different-length stanzas, the rhythm, imagery and narrative thread get lost and it turns into some ponderous musings about Copernicus and philosophy - unmistakable Stevens, but lacking focus and direction, more like a first draft than a finished (great) poem. What's going on? When I search the Web, the only version I can find is the one I know, in tercets throughout. I know of one other Stevens poem where variant versions exist, 'The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad' (another favourite). In this case, the version published in the Collected Poems is missing a stanza, apparently simply overlooked when Stevens was preparing the collection. I have the later The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by Holly Stevens, which restores the stanza, and is said to be more complete than the Collected in its range of material. Is this problem with 'Not Ideas' another difference between the two? Burnside's introduction doesn't mention the poem.

The Wallace Stevens Society (in the USA), which publishes the biannual Wallace Steven Journal, requires citations to be taken from the 1997 Library of America edition, rather than the earlier Knopf (Faber) editions – as I well know, having an essay in the current number. In the Library of America edition, the poem appears in its familiar form. I have not come across a version that matches your description. I shall look it up.

Faber's original Selected was chosen by Stevens himself. It is interesting among other things for the way he curtailed and re-organized "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven".

Clive Watkins

The offending lines that hijack the end of 'Not Ideas...' are from a different poem entirely, the uncollected late poem 'As at a Theatre'. It's a case of botchery pure and simple, I'm afraid.

I suspect this mangling may have come about in the following way. In the 1997 Library of America edition, the last four stanzas of “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” appear at the top of page 452. The last eight lines of “As at a Theatre” appear at the top of page 456. The paper of this edition is very thin. I imagine that whoever set the copy may have been using this edition and have turned over three pages from 451, at the foot of which the first two stanzas of “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” are printed, to 456, and so picked up the wrong set of lines.

I should have thought the disjunction, which is a matter both of syntax and sense, would have been obvious to anyone who read the resulting text with anything more than passing attention. Given the importance of “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” in Stevens’s work (quite apart, that is, from, its individual merits as a poem), this is particularly unfortunate.

Clive

As a courtesy, could someone let Faber know. They can correct that for the reprint.

I did so this morning, before posting here.

Clive

Thanks, David and Clive, for sorting that out. What an unfortunate thing to have happened to such a great poem.