Different Revelations

...The poet had conceived a different order, beginning with "Under Ben Bulben" and concluding with "Politics"?wherein Yeats is distracted by the beauty of a girl at a rally and cries, "But O that I were young again/And held her in my arms...

...One executive, Arthur Polley, wondered if they had been written "with his tongue in his cheek, and the country picked up on him and said he was a great poet...

...After a few drinks, "he got very hilarious in many ways," yet never unbuttoned enough to allow others to impinge on his privacy...

...The few valuable recollections are the ones that tell us how Stevens juggled business and poetry, or offer some tantalizing hints about his attitudes toward his own writing, a subject he would never discuss directly...

...Biographies often reveal more about surfaces than essence, and its very nature makes this especially true of Brazeau's compilation...

...One wonders why James Joyce did not borrow, for example, a poem about a girl who "prays for every falling tear/In the holy church of God" for his parody of literary slush in the Gerty MacDowell chapter of Ulysses...

...and that he kept his poetry notes in the right-hand bottom drawer of his desk and had his secretary type them...

...He enjoyed Hartford's "Canoe Club," with its pictures of nudes behind the bar, its roast beef and martini lunches, and its atmosphere of male camaraderie...

...While such tidbits may gratify curiosity, they will hardly move anyone to rush out and read "Auroras of Autumn...

...By contrast, the writers here speak more of the esthete recognizable in poems like "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon...

...Finneran's splendid new edition of The Poems allows us to follow him from his callow setting forth to the last burst of creativity cut short by death, about which he concluded, / must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart...

...Brazeau, in addition, gives us some clues to the different "voices" in the poems, isolating especially that of Judge Arthur Powell, a Southern friend...

...Yeats was determined from the outset to remake the rather desiccated poetry of the late 19th century into something primitive and bardic...

...Patrick, but the country of bloody outrages, of Jonathan Swift's furious indignation, of senseless violence and sacrifice...

...The justification for delving into an author's life is to illuminate his work...

...He was proud of the Old School Tie (Harvard), and he returned his lecture fees to show that he did not write for money...

...Finneran further amends some texts according to notes in the poet's hand, and includes 122 previously unassembled poems: some juvenilia, a few verses from prose volumes, songs from plays, and bits of late ephemera...

...He was serious about poetry...

...The Judge's regional idioms provided the poet with phrases, and with such titles as "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" and "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery...

...There is no overriding point of view...

...Yeats, though, did not live to see his Last Poems through the press...

...I was part of the fun-and-frolic side of Wallace Stevens' life," begins Margaret Powers, who, along with her lawyer husband, used to party with him...

...This junk heap stands for both the detritus of the unconscious and Mad Ireland in her ruin...

...Wallace Stevens has until now remained the outstanding exception...

...Overall, Stevens comes across as very much a man of a certain class and era...

...Horseman, pass by...

...This is not the case...

...Few of the interviewees call themselves "friends" of Stevens...

...Although his conceptions later deepened enough to enable him to write well on these themes, he ultimately decided they were a false tack...

...Parts Of A World does not add up to a portrait of the artist...

...Richard J. Finneran retrieves this verse, plus others, in his definitive collection of The Poems of W.B...

...A Cuban editor, Josd Rodriguez Feo, told Brazeau: "He gave me the impression of being a Frenchman or an Italian, not an American----I noted this love of life in his enjoyment l of beautiful things...

...JL, rom the trivia of Brazeau's oral biography, one turns with pleasure to a book filled with literary revelations...

...His colleagues were generally respectful of, albeit bewildered by his verses...

...Fellow executives, while describing him as "a superintellect" and an indefatigable worker, remember that he was sarcastic and often undiplomatic...

...Much of the material is interesting in a mildly gossipy way-A story, for instance, of Hemingway breaking the poet's jawin a fistfight...

...Yeats was a supremely inspired intelligence who willed himself into becoming a great writer...

...The book consists of more than 150 reminiscences by business colleagues, fellow poets, relatives, neighbors, servants, and anyone else willing to provide a first-hand impression of the Great Man...

...From the patchwork Brazeau has assembled we learn, too, of Stevens' deathbed conversion to Catholicism-disputed by his daughter, who refused to participate in the project...

...He was the most likable poet I ever met, the one with the best manners," recalls Frank Jones, who introduced himself after having reviewed Stevens...

...Poet Richard Eberhart observes that "he lived in a world of grand Republicanism...

...Finneran shows that the real juvenilia were downright embarrassing: effusions on fairies, turgid mock pastorals, neo-Pre-Raphaelite epics on themes from Irish mythology, all in the affected style of student verse...

...Stevens was known as a kidder at the company, though his humor was so deadpan that many had trouble telling when he was joking...

...He also restores the order of the Irish master's late output...

...Brazeau himself demonstrates that "the commonly held view that [Stevens'] co-workers did not know he was a poet until many years after he had come to Hartford is more myth than fact...

...sometimes it is hard to believe the same man is being discussed from one account to the next...

...Nor are there any major revelations...

...But in academic surroundings Stevens was uncomfortable: "A poor lecturer and a worse reader," comments critic Harry Levin, who sat through several evenings during which Stevens was completely inaudible to the audience...

...The 1933 edition of The Poems gives the impression that Yeats started out writing at the level of "The Lake Isle of In-nisfree...

...as something of a celebrity," since the new job coincided with his winning a major prize from Poetry Magazine...

...It was not easy for him to address people by first names," notes Samuel French Morse...

...And as published, the sequence starts with the somber mood of "The Gyres" and closes with that self-composed epitaph from "Under Ben Bulben": Cast a cold eye On life, on death...

...On the contrary, "Stevens arrived...

...Yeats (Macmil-lan, 747 pp., $19.95...

...In the past, editors had simply added to Yeats' own 1933 collection the work produced between that date and the poet's death in 1939...

...Thanks to Finneran, we now know that he was initially moved by a longing for a kind of greeting-card Ireland filled with fairies, saints and heroes...

...Yeats came to see the source of his images as "A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street/Old kettles, old botdes, and a broken can./Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut/Who keeps the till...

...Popular wisdom had it that his life as a family man and a vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company was too humdrum: daily office routine in a job he held from 1916 until his death in 1955, a reclusive home existence, occasional business trips, vacations in Key West...

...PartsOfA Worlddoes, to its credit, show us Stevens' sense of fun, even silliness...

...It seemed fitting that this poet, who called his Muse "the Interior Paramour," enjoyed reading about Europe but refused to travel there because he feared it would become less real for him if he actually saw it This standard picture has not been substantially contradicted by Parts Of A World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (Random House, 330 pp., $19.95), an "oral biography" assembled by Peter Brazeau...

...To shift this song of yearning away from the final spot is to minimize the Yeatsian mask of "The Wild Old Wicked Man" in favor of a more magisterial portrait of Ireland's Senator and Nobel Prize winner...

...William Butler Yeats, a compulsive reviser of his poetry and his personality, wrote: The friends that have it 1 do wrong When ever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake...

...Indeed, better known, because readers who have scarcely cracked a book of verse since leaving school are nevertheless conversant, through recent tell-all biographies, with the public and private foibles of Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and Auden...

...That is now corrected, and throughout the author's eccentric punctuation, tampered with over the years, has been retained...

...Nevertheless, within that discipline he could be humorous, and this side of him critics generally fail to acknowledge...

...Unfortunately, too little that is uncovered brings us any closer to understanding the writer whose credo was: Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs...

...he "lived like a monk," in the words of many who knew him, in order to have time to write...

...Stevens appears to have been most at ease, however, with subordinates and the young, to judge by their glowing testimonials...

...Still, he did cultivate a one-of-the-boys image among his fellow insurance men...

...His Ireland was not the home of wee folk and St...