Helen Vendler is wonderful, superb. Her remarks about Stevens' debts to Keats have been on my mind:
Stevens had so absorbed Keats that Keats acted in his mind as a perpendicular from which he constructed his own oblique poems: what we see as a secrecy of allusion was for Stevens no secrecy but rather an exfoliation of a continuing inner dialogue with Keats. Stevens' allusions, in his briefer poems, are more often to content than to language. If Keats says "tree," Stevens will say "pinetrees," "junipers," "spruces." If Keats says "the north...with a sleety whistle," Stevens will say "the sound of the wind." And if Keats says "crystal fretting" and "frozen time," of ice, Stevens will say "frost," "snow," "ice." If Keats says "not to feel," Stevens says "not to think."
Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (1984)
And this passage of astonishing condensation:
Stevens' poetry is a poetry of feeling pressed to an extreme; the pressure itself produces the compression and condensation of the work. The pressure of the imagination pressing back against reality, as Stevens called it, is very great: If you confine Greece, Keats, and Tennessee in the same chamber of your mind for a time, the amalgam solidifies into the famous stoneware jar and its preposterous sulky stanzas-- "Tell me, what form can possibly suit the slovenly wilderness?"
Back in 1989 I was talking to Michael Fischer, then chair in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, about my possible plans for a Ph.D. in American Literature there.I said I'd choose either one of the following three authors as my subject: Stevens, Faulkner, and Kenneth Burke. I didn't know what field to concentrate in: poetry, the novel, or criticism. I could have been an American critic; but it didn't happen. At that time my other plan was to move to Baton Rouge and LSU to write a dissertation on Edouard Glissant under his own supervision (Glissant was there at that time before his relocation to CUNY). And this didn't happen, either. I finally chose Seattle, the first American city I had set my foot on in 1972 and a city that I've been in love to this day. And the twenty years' detour began.
