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Literary critics simply “get it wrong” when it comes to Wallace Stevens’ poetry of thought, his “supreme fiction,” even such eminent critics as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler. They get it wrong because they have not carefully considered and accounted for Stevens’ prose, especially his The Irrational Element in Poetry. Thus, with this claim, we begin the journey with Dr. Groves, who shares with us, in his lectures, the fruits of his ten-year study of Wallace Stevens. That claim may seem audacious to those who have a penchant for deferring to literary critics before fully understanding the subject matter at hand. Even so eminent a critic as Hugh Kenner dismisses Stevens’ poetry as a high form of nonsense verse. With Stevens’ poetry, however, we are dealing with, as Northrop Frye puts it, “the processes of poetic thought at work.” Dr. Groves, who is a philosopher, poet, and artist himself, insists throughout his lectures that poetry, especially Stevens’, is not the handmaid of philosophy. Dr. Groves is well-equipped to help us view Stevens’ verse through the lens of Continental philosophy. He views Stevens as a transcontinental poet with his links to western Europe, not limited to the bounds of the United States, as Vendler claims. Stevens’ poetry is wholly different from what the literary critics in the halls of academe claim it to be. Dr. Groves’ lectures have opened my eyes to view Wallace Stevens in the right way.Matthew Keenan