During his exploration, Tompsett proves to be greatly interested in the poet's gestures and figures of connection and primal unity, which he reads principally in the context of Parmenides' "blank monism" (Santayana's phrase quoted on 43), even when such ontological reductions to the One are frequently founded on a Heraclitean multiplicity and sense of polemos - the Greek word for war whose role in the analysis has affinities with what we would nowadays frame as Darwinian struggle. Many of his readings of individual poems and key Stevensian concepts are also compelling: the Heraclitean elements in "Earthy Anecdote" and "Domination of Black" are convincingly demonstrated, as are the pre-Socratic roots of the "first idea"; the analysis of "The Idea of Order at Key West" through the concept of techne is well done; "Of Modern Poetry" profits from linking the "metaphysician in the dark" (CPP 219) to "Heraclitus the Dark," and its ending is interestingly revealed to have an antifascist slant; the interpretations of "Metaphor as Degeneration" and "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself" deserve to be singled out as well; and we are clearly able to extend our purchase on Stevens' poetic thinking when we begin to see his "supreme fiction" in terms of a "universal hermeneutics" (152). In this sense, Tompsett's book may be felt to suffer occasionally from the violent reduction the author so convincingly criticizes in Stevens' poetic worldview. Because he seeks to adduce as much evidence as he can to demonstrate the relevance of pre-Socratic ontological thinking for our understanding of Stevens, Tompsett is not quite willing to pay attention to the many ways in which the poetry contradicts, complicates, obscures, or resists such an assimilation - and how its doing so might add to the poetry's aesthetic value.