Mariani’s is the kind of scholarly or critical, or perhaps better, uninquisitive biography that doesn’t say where or how Stevens met his wife, Elsie Moll, in 1904, but can’t do without a four-page discussion of ‘one of his signature poems, “Sunday Morning”’; that doesn’t stoop to explain what ‘surety claims’ are [...] but claims to hear ‘puns’ in such phrases as ‘barque of phosphor’ or ‘droning of the surf’ in the early ‘Fabliau of Florida’, or the ‘kaka: shit, merde’ within Stevens’s ‘envious cachinnations’ (which misunderstands, I think, the value, function and deployment of long words); that tackles his later years as though there was nothing in them but the composing and delivering of lectures. [...] Mariani has evolved a glissando paraphrase technique with which he skims through Stevens’s letters, poems and prose, mincing snippets of quotation and his own words in a nervous and unhelpfully unattributable way – almost in the hectic style of an unauthorised biographer not allowed to quote his subject. [...]
There is something very evidently life-affirming about Stevens that Mariani’s book doesn’t really convey. [...] [T]he signs of life in Stevens are not to be found there. They are solitary, and focused on things. They are the long walks he took as a young man in the Pennsylvania countryside and, when he lived in New York, along the New Jersey Palisades. They are ordering an expensive ‘alligator pear’ (the expressive term then for the avocado) in a restaurant. They are ‘the usual gifts of oranges for Holly from the Mays down in Jacksonville, and packages from Ceylon sent by Leonard van Geyzel, a gentleman planter whom Stevens had asked months earlier to gather local artefacts which only Ceylon could offer’, in Mariani’s culpably unexcited account. But this was precisely what excited Stevens; it was in fact what he lived for.

What can another biography add to [Joan Richardson's and Peter Brazeau's]? Paul Mariani hopes to contribute a fuller representation of Stevens’s inner life. If the attempt fails, it is because the biography does not, or cannot, adequately convey the complicated feelings evident in the diction of Stevens’s poetry. Mariani’s stream-of-consciousness recital, as he ventriloquizes Stevens’s presumed thoughts while composing, wants readers to live within the poem as it comes to birth. That desire, however bravely conceived, produces strange pages that slip in and out of a cascade of quoted phrases evoking neither real Stevens nor real Mariani, but rather a hybrid “voice” mixing biographical “facts” and deduced “introspection” (with occasional interpolated critical observations). [...] “Has it all been a waste, then? Has it been a terrible miscalculation?” This maudlin tone in no way resembles Stevens’s own, which, even in grief, was not self-pitying but philosophical and ironic.

Mariani persuasively numbers Stevens among the twentieth-century poets who are both most powerful and most refined in their eloquence, along with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. [...] It takes heroic stamina to get through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and other of the late long poems, which American literary culture coped with at the time by loading Stevens with every possible prize, honor, and encomium. Since then, his reputation has stood as a windswept monument, tended by professors. [...] [Mariani] has a prehensile feel for the roots and branches of literary modernism, exemplary taste in what he chooses to quote, and a real gift for exegesis, unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows.