Early-career poetry poses tantalizing questions: How did this poet start off so terrible'and end up so good' Or, more rarely: How did they start off so good'and get so much better' But a writer's final works are compelling for a different reason: They offer not a preview or a draft, but an opportunity to reflect, sometimes with a critical eye, on past ideas and commitments. The American poet Wallace Stevens published his last work in The Atlantic in April 1955, four months before he died of stomach cancer. 'July Mountain' is an homage to Vermont in the summer'surprising, perhaps, for this poet with a 'mind of winter.' It's also a digest, in 10 lines, of Stevens's lifelong preoccupations, and a clear expression of his desire to make order out of a chaotic, suffocating world. Like many poems shadowed by mortality, 'July Mountain' has what the late literary critic Helen Vendler called 'binocular vision,' focused on both life and death. This, according to Vendler, is the peculiar power...
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