The Wallace Stevens Case

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“This lucid and insightful study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens by Stanford Law Professor Thomas Grey demonstrates that a lawyer can enrich our understanding of poetry and a poet enrich our understanding of jurisprudence.”—Richard A. Posner, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

“The book was a great help to me in thinking about Stevens—a poet whom I don’t know as well as I’d like, whom I often don’t understand, whom I’ve never been able to read much of at a time, and whose poems I’ve never been able to hear as the products of a single voice. Grey helps one see them as such products—particularly by telling you when he thinks the voice goes off key, as in the ‘Major Man’ poems. Thanks to Grey, I feel prepared to go back to Stevens’s poems and to read them with fewer guards up, with less suspicion and more sympathy. The book sketches a convincing picture of Stevens’s motives and conflicts. Its last chapter, ‘The Colors of the Mind,’ finishes off the sketch with bravura and conviction.”—Richard Rorty, University of Virginia