The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
The complete poems of an insurance executive who wrote some of the century's most abstract and beautiful verse.
Stevens spent his working life as an insurance executive in Hartford and published his first collection at forty-four. The Collected Poems gathers everything he authorised, from Harmonium to The Rock, including Sunday Morning, The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, months before he died.
Recommended by 1 Person
Edmund de Waal
I absolutely loved Stevens when I first read him. There’s something at the heart of his poems which is very abstract. He’s dealing with issues about what’s real and what’s imagined, and how you reconstruct the world endlessly through your imagination. They are very beautiful poems and poems that you can reread endlessly, because they are really about imagination and being in the world. They’re also odd poems.
Interview · May 2012
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