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  • Published: 18 August 2015
  • ISBN: 9781101911686
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $39.99

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

The Corrected Edition




On the anniversary of Wallace Stevens's death--a new edition of his Collected Poems, containing more than 150 corrections based on original manuscripts and published versions. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

An essential book for all readers of poetry, and the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet." 

Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday, the book was rushed into print for the occasion and contained scores of errors. These have now been corrected in one place for the first time by Stevens scholars John N. Serio and Christopher Beyers, based on original editions and manuscripts.

The Collected Poems is the one volume that Stevens intended to contain all the poems he wished to preserve, presented in the way he wanted. It is an enduring monument to his dazzling achievement.

  • Published: 18 August 2015
  • ISBN: 9781101911686
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 592
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955. Although he had contributed to the Harvard Advocate while in college, he began to gain general recognition only when Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a special 1914 wartime issue of Poetry. Harmonium, his first volume of poems, was published in 1923, and was followed by Ideas of Order (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), The Necessary Angel (a volume of essays, 1951), The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954), and Opus Posthumous (first published in 1957, edited by Samuel French Morse; a new, revised, and corrected edition by Milton J. Bates, 1989). Mr. Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949. In 1951 he won the National Book Award in Poetry for The Auroras of Autumn, in 1955 he won it a second time for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1955. From 1916 on, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice president in 1934.

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Praise for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

  • "After the reader has admired certain lines because Shakespeare might have written them, he begins to admire them because only Stevens could." --Robert Fitzgerald
  • "One might as well argue with the Evening Star as find fault with so much wit and grace and intelligence . . . such an overwhelming and exquisite command both of the words and of the rhythms of our language; such charm and irony, such natural and philosophical breadth of sympathy, such dignity and magnanimity." -- Randall Jarrell
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