Most writers scribble notes to themselves, often on scraps of paper or on the backs of envelopes. It tells us something about the kind of man Wallace Stevens was that he organized his notes into several discrete notebooks, each with its own title, and made entries in an extremely neat hand, using a pencil so that he could erase mistakes. In a notebook called “Adagia,” he recorded reflections, mostly in epigrammatic form, on his abiding theme, the relation of reality and imagination: “Poetry and materia poetica are interchangeable terms.” “We live in the mind.” “The poet is the priest of the invisible.” In “From Pieces of Paper” and “Schemata,” he jotted down images, title ideas, and the like: “Cats & Marigolds.” “A poem like a season of the mind.” “Asides on the Oboe.” Last of all—and probably least—he kept a two-volume commonplace book, its entries dating from 1932 to the early Fifties (he died in 1955), which contains a total of 104 items, most of them quotations. The collective title of these two notebooks, Sur Plusiers Beaux Sujects (“on several beautiful subjects”), apparently derives from that of a sixteenth-century French collection of ancient Greek epigrams (sujects is an early spelling for sujets).
Now Milton J. Bates, a professor at Marquette University and the author of Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of the Self has turned these two slim cahiersinto a slim, handsome book. On the versos are facsimiles of Stevens’s lined gray notebook pages; facing them on the rectos are transcriptions of those pages’ contents, along