[In the following review, Berthoff offers a positive assessment of On Extended Wings, but faults Vendler's narrow focus on “descriptive explication” of Stevens's poetry.]

The point of departure for this close-woven essay is the critical judgment that the best of Stevens is in those longer poems—from “Sunday Morning” in 1915 to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” of 1949–1950—which mark off the main intervals and developments of his beautifully extended career. This judgment has the support of Stevens himself, who wrote that “prolonged attention to a single subject” is what most fully “liberates” imagination and at the same time “naturalizes” it, for the reader as well as the poet. The critical commentary Mrs. Vendler offers [in On Extended Wings] is intelligent and acute. Moreover, it springs from a personal sympathy that does not fail to communicate the rich charm and pathos, and the spells of declamatory grandeur, that Stevens rose to again and again in these brilliant poems. From first to last, Harmonium to The Auroras of Autumn and beyond, “he mutter spiffy” （as John Berryman’s dream song puts it, not spitefully）, and it is a first virtue of this study to keep that poetic spiffiness in full view.

Mrs. Vendler is especially good in describing Stevens’s style and its progressive transformations. （She gives due praise to earlier work on this subject, in particular Frank Doggett’s.） She writes tellingly of the “elaborately mannered movement of thought” that, in one tonality or another, is the basis of Stevens’s rhetoric; of a delicate “drift” of moods. and of provocatively unresolved debates over the meaning of certain exotic perceptions and “forms half-glimpsed,” the “presences” that attend the seasons and chromatic variations of the mind’s fluctuating life among phenomena （Stevens’s great subject）; of the lavish accretion of metaphors which are “extremely provisional in their species, but quite permanent in their genus”; of the virtuoso play of “appositions and qualifications,” an elegantly “incremental” style, with corresponding “oscillations of rhythm”; of the special extensions of these strategies which give “The Man With the Blue Guitar” its “rigid and flawless structure” of alternating stasis and flow, and “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” its freer and grander harmony; and, movingly, of “the great and remote poetry of Stevens’s old age, so unlike any other poetry in English.” Her discussions continually send us back to the poems and concentrate a sense, lovely to renew, of their distinguishing solemnity and poise. What better service can commentary perform?

Specialists in American literature, among others, may nevertheless regret that Mrs. Vendler’s study sticks so closely to the tasks of descriptive explication. （And couldn’t a less devout title have been provided?） To place, for example, Stevens’s poetry of mental gesture and symbolic hypothesis in full relation to that subjectivist rhetoric which Emerson first mastered in American writing and which remains so primary a mode in our subsequent literature, and graphic art, is not only to reach a more precise sense of the governing genius of his style. It may also serve to situate that nagging further impression set down in Berryman’s little poem—an impression hardly to be admitted in a critical brief which makes its corroborative appeal almost exclusively to the class and type of Wordsworth, Milton, Spenser—of an “odd … something … something … not there in his flourishing art.” Mrs. Vendler acknowledges a “narrowness,” a persistent abstraction of experience into diagrammatic soliloquy; but—to take a major case—in her account of “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” she makes no mention, and gives no indication of feeling the absence, of that fourth section that Stevens once regretted not having gone on to write, a section to be called “It Must Be Human.” There is an issue of imaginative grasp and equity that must be faced in Stevens; a sense of a particular limitation （a built-in tautology of argument and syntax together） that we do not feel in the greatest poetry, including that of other Anglo-American moderns, like Yeats, Eliot, Hart Crane, not less capable of transcendental heightenings but holding a fuller purchase on the body of human life. （Stevens’s letters, in the great collection published by his daughter in 1966, seem to me very revealing in this regard, binding the poems far more intimately than one had suspected to a lifelong regimen, toughly and artfully persisted in, of personal endurance and self-restoration; but Mrs. Vendler does not make much use of them, except in matters of interpretive detail.） The point, of course, is not to put Wallace Stevens down or discourage absorption in him but to identify more precisely the real oddness of his achievement—of which the one thing that may not be said, as Lowell remarked of Emerson’s peculiar eloquence, is that it was not noble. This ultimate critical task is one which Mrs. Vendler’s book, where one agrees with it and where one disagrees, will both encourage and advance.