Back Collected Poetry & Prose

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose

Edited by Joan Richardson and Frank Kermode

“Undoubtedly, the single finest collection of Wallace Stevens ever produced.” — Library Journal

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

News New exhibitions humanize three twentieth century writers
February 15, 2019

Wallace Stevens’s unique voice combined meditative speculation and what he called “the essential gaudiness of poetry” in a body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance, poems that have remained an inspiration and influence for generations of poets and readers. Now, for the first time, the works of America’s supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative Library of America volume.

Here are all of Stevens’s published books of poetry, side-by-side for the first time with the haunting lyrics of his later years and early work that traces the development of his art. From the rococo inventiveness of Harmonium, his first volume (including such classics as “Sunday Morning” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”), through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “Esthétique du Mal,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” and the other large-scale masterpieces of his middle years, to the austere final poems of “The Rock,” Stevens’s poetry explores with unrelenting intensity the relation between the world and the human imagination, between nature as found and nature as invented, and the ways poetry mediates between them. The volume presents over ninety poems uncollected by Stevens, including early versions of often-discussed works like “The Comedian as the Letter C” and “Owl’s Clover.”

Also here is the most comprehensive selection of Stevens’s prose writings. The Necessary Angel (1951), his distinguished book of essays, joins nearly fifty shorter pieces, many previously uncollected: reviews, speeches, short stories, criticism, philosophical writings, and responses to the work of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and other poets. The often-dazzling aphorisms Stevens gathered over the years are included, as are his plays and selections from his poetic notebooks. Rounding out the volume is a fifty-year span of journal entries and letters, newly edited from manuscript sources, which provide fascinating glimpses of Stevens’s thoughts on poetry and the creative process.

The volume also contains explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Stevens’ life, and an essay on textual selection.

The volume’s editors, Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, provide notes and a detailed chronology of Stevens’s life. Frank Kermode, one of the world’s leading literary critics, was King Edward VII Professor of English at Cambridge University. Joan Richardson is the author of the standard biography of the poet, published in two volumes as Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923 and The Later Years, 1923–1955. She is professor of English and comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for this volume was provided by James Merrill.

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose is kept in print by a gift from the Ingram Merrill Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund, made in memory of James Merrill.
Table of Contents
HARMONIUM (1923)
- Earthy Anecdote
- Invective Against Swans
- In the Carolinas
- The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage
- The Plot Against the Giant
- Infanta Marina
- Domination of Black
- The Snow Man
- The Ordinary Women
- The Load of Sugar-Cane
- Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
- Nuances of a Theme by Williams
- Metaphors of a Magnifico
- Ploughing on Sunday
- Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges
- Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores
- Fabliau of Florida
- The Doctor of Geneva
- Another Weeping Woman
- Homunculus et La Belle Etoile
- The Comedian as the Letter C
- From the Misery of Don Joost
- O, Florida, Venereal Soil
- Last Looks at the Lilacs
- The Worms at Heaven’s Gate
- The Jack-Rabbit
- Valley Candle
- Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
- The Silver Plough-Boy
- The Apostrophe to Vincentine
- Floral Decorations for Bananas
- Anecdote of Canna
- Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds
- Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb
- Of the Surface of Things
- Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
- A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
- The Place of the Solitaires
- The Weeping Burgher
- The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
- Banal Sojourn
- Depression Before Spring
- The Emperor of Ice-Cream
- The Cuban Doctor
- Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
- Exposition of the Contents of a Cab
- Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
- Sunday Morning
- The Virgin Carrying a Lantern
- Stars at Tallapoosa
- Explanation
- Six Significant Landscapes
- Bantams in Pine-Woods
- Anecdote of the Jar
- Palace of the Babies
- Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.
- Jasmine’s Beautiful Thoughts Underneath the Willow
- Cort;agege for Rosenbloom
- Tattoo
- The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
- Life Is Motion
- Architecture
- The Wind Shifts
- Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
- Gubbinal
- Two Figures in Dense Violet Night
- Theory
- To the One of Fictive Music
- Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion
- Peter Quince at the Clavier
- Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
- Nomad Exquisite
- Tea
- To the Roaring Wind
POEMS ADDED TO HARMONIUM (1931)
- The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad
- The Death of a Soldier
- Negation
- The Surprises of the Superhuman
- Sea Surface Full of Clouds
- The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade
- New England Verses
- Lunar Paraphrase
- Anatomy of Monotony
- The Public Square
- Sonatina to Hans Christian
- In the Clear Season of Grapes
- Two at Norfolk
- Indian River
IDEAS OF ORDER (1936)
- Farewell to Florida
- Ghosts as Cocoons
- Sailing After Lunch
- Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz
- Dance of the Macabre Mice
- Meditation Celestial & Terrestrial
- Lions in Sweden
- How To Live. What To Do
- Some Friends from Pascagoula
- Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu
- The Idea of Order at Key West
- The American Sublime
- Mozart, 1935
- Snow and Stars
- The Sun This March
- Botanist on Alp (No. 1)
- Botanist on Alp (No. 2)
- Evening Without Angels
- The Brave Man
- A Fading of the Sun
- Gray Stones and Gray Pigeons
- Winter Bells
- Academic Discourse at Havana
- Nudity at the Capital
- Nudity in the Colonies
- Re-statement of Romance
- The Reader
- Mud Master
- Anglais Mort á Florence
- The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
- Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery
- A Postcard from the Volcano
- Autumn Refrain
- A Fish-Scale Sunrise
- Gallant Chateau
- Delightful Evening
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR (1937)
- The Man with the Blue Guitar
- Owl’s Clover
- A Thought Revolved
- The Men That Are Falling
PARTS OF A WORLD (1942)
- Parochial Theme
- Poetry Is a Destructive Force
- The Poems of Our Climate
- Prelude to Objects
- Study of Two Pears
- The Glass of Water
- Add This to Rhetoric
- Dry Loaf
- Idiom of the Hero
- The Man on the Dump
- On the Road Home
- The Latest Freed Man
- United Dames of America
- Country Words
- The Dwarf
- A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
- Loneliness in Jersey City
- Anything Is Beautiful If You Say It Is
- A Weak Mind in the Mountains
- The Bagatelles the Madrigals
- Girl in a Nightgown
- Connoisseur of Chaos
- The Blue Buildings in the Summer Air
- Dezembrum
- Poem Written at Morning
- Life on a Battleship
- The Woman That Had More Babies Than That
- Thunder by the Musician
- The Common Life
- The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man
- The Candle a Saint
- A Dish of Peaches in Russia
- Arcades of Philadelphia the Past
- Of Hartford in a Purple Light
- Cuisine Bourgeoise
- Forces, the Will & the Weather
- On an Old Horn
- Bouquet of Belle Scavoir
- Variations on a Summer Day
- Yellow Afternoon
- Martial Cadenza
- Man and Bottle
- Of Modern Poetry
- Arrival at the Waldorf
- Landscape with Boat
- On the Adequacy of Landscape
- Les Plus Belles Pages
- Poem with Rhythms
- Woman Looking at a Vase of Flowers
- The Well Dressed Man with a Beard
- Of Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun
- Mrs. Alfred Uruguay
- Asides on the Oboe
- Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas
- Montrachet-le-Jardin
- The News and the Weather
- Metamorphosis
- Contrary Theses (I)
- Phosphor Reading by His Own Light
- The Search for Sound Free from Motion
- Jumbo
- Contrary Theses (II)
- The Hand as a Being
- Oak Leaves Are Hands
- Examination of the Hero in a Time of War
- “The immense poetry of war…,”
TRANSPORT TO SUMMER (1947)
- God Is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night
- Certain Phenomena of Sound
- The Motive for Metaphor
- Gigantomachia
- Dutch Graves in Bucks County
- No Possum, No Sop, No Taters
- So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch
- Chocorua to Its Neighbor
- Poesie Abrutie
- The Lack of Repose
- Somnambulisma
- Crude Foyer
- Repetitions of a Young Captain
- The Creations of Sound
- Holiday in Reality
- Esthétique du Mal
- The Bed of Old John Zeller
- Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit
- Wild Ducks, People and Distances
- The Pure Good of Theory
- A Word with José Rodríguez-Feo
- Paisant Chronicle
- Sketch of the Ultimate Politician
- Flyer’s Fall
- Jouga
- Debris of Life and Mind
- Description Without Place
- Two Tales of Liadoff
- Analysis of a Theme
- Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain
- Man Carrying Thing
- Pieces
- A Completely New Set of Objects
- Adult Epigram
- Two Versions of the Same Poem
- Men Made Out of Words
- Thinking of a Relation Between the Images of Metaphors
- Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion
- The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
- Continual Conversation with a Silent Man
- A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home
- The Pediment of Appearance
- Burghers of Petty Death
- Human Arrangement
- The Good Man Has No Shape
- The Red Fern
- From the Packet of Anacharsis
- The Dove in the Belly
- Mountains Covered with Cats
- The Prejudice Against the Past
- Extraordinary References
- Attempt to Discover Life
- A Lot of People Bathing in a Stream
- Credences of Summer
- A Pastoral Nun
- The Pastor Caballero
- Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN (1950)
- The Auroras of Autumn
- Page from a Tale
- Large Red Man Reading
- This Solitude of Cataracts
- In the Element of Antagonisms
- In a Bad Time
- The Beginning
- The Countryman
- The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract
- Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight
- The Owl in the Sarcophagus
- Saint John and the Back-Ache
- Celle Qui Fût Héaulmiette
- Imago
- A Primitive Like an Orb
- Metaphor as Degeneration
- The Woman in Sunshine
- Reply to Papini
- The Bouquet
- World Without Peculiarity
- Our Stars Come from Ireland
- Puella Parvula
- The Novel
- What We See Is What We Think
- A Golden Woman in a Silver Mirror
- The Old Lutheran Bells at Home
- Questions Are Remarks
- Study of Images I
- Study of Images II
- An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
- Things of August
- Angel Surrounded by Paysans
THE ROCK (1954)
- An Old Man Asleep
- The Irish Cliffs of Moher
- The Plain Sense of Things
- One of the Inhabitants of the West
- Lebensweisheitspielerei
- The Hermitage at the Centre
- The Green Plant
- Madame La Fleurie
- To an Old Philosopher in Rome
- Vacancy in the Park
- The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
- Two Illustrations That the World Is What You Make of It
- Prologues To What Is Possible
- Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
- Song of Fixed Accord
- The World as Meditation
- Long and Sluggish Lines
- A Quiet Normal Life
- Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
- The Rock
- St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside
- Note on Moonlight
- The Planet on the Table
- The River of Rivers in Connecticut
- Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
LATE POEMS (1950-55)
- The Sick Man
- As at a Theatre
- The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda
- Nuns Painting Water-Lilies
- The Role of the Idea in Poetry
- Americana
- The Souls of Women at Night
- A Discovery of Thought
- The Course of a Particular
- How Now, O, Brightener …
- The Dove in Spring
- Farewell Without a Guitar
- The Sail of Ulysses
- Presence of an External Master of Knowledge
- A Child Asleep in Its Own Life
- Two Letters
- Conversation with Three Women of New England
- Dinner Bell in the Woods
- Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination
- On the Way to the Bus
- The Region November
- Solitaire Under the Oaks
- Local Objects
- Artificial Populations
- A Clear Day and No Memories
- Banjo Boomer
- July Mountain
- “A mythology reflects its region …”
- Of Mere Being
UNCOLLECTED POEMS
- Autumn
- Who Lies Dead?
- Vita Mea
- Self-Respect
- Sonnets
- Song (“She loves me or loves me not,”)
- “You say this is the iris?”
- Imitation of Sidney: To Stella (Miss B?)
- Quatrain (“Go not, young cloud, too boldly through the sky”)
- To the Morn
- Song (“Ah yes! beyond these barren walls”)
- Outside the Hospital
- Street Songs
- Ode
- Night-Song
- Ballade of the Pink Parasol
- Quatrain (“He sought the music of the distant spheres”)
- A Window in the Slums
- Sonnet (“Build up the walls about me; close each door”)
- To Miss Gage
- “If I love thee, I am thine,”
- “Elsie’s mirror only shows,”
- From a Vagabond
- A Book of Verses
- Chiaroscuro
- In a Garden
- The Little June Book
- Colors
- Testamentum
- Sonnet from the Book of Regrets
- A Valentine
- Dolls
- Infernale
- “All things imagined are of earth compact,”
- L’Essor Saccadé
- An Exercise for Professor X
- Headache
- “I have lived so long with the rhetoricians,”
- “The night-wind of August,”
- To Madame Alda, Singing a Song, in a White Gown
- Carnet de Voyage
- From a Junk
- Home Again
- Phases
- Blanche McCarthy
- For an Old Woman in a Wig
- The Florist Wears Knee-Breeches
- Song (“There are great things doing”)
- Inscription for a Monument
- Bowl
- Primordia
- Meditation
- Gray Room
- Lettres d’un Soldat
- Instant of Clearness
- The Naked Eye of the Aunt
- Peter Parasol
- Piano Practice at the Academy of the Holy Angels
- The Indigo Glass in the Grass
- Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks (1919=n20?)
- Anecdote of the Abnormal
- Romance for a Demoiselle Lying in the Grass
- Lulu Gay
- Lulu Morose
- This Vast Inelegance
- Saturday Night at the Chiropodist’s
- Mandolin and Liqueurs
- The Shape of the Coroner
- Red Loves Kit
- “Though Valentine brings love,”
- Metropolitan Melancholy
- Annual Gaiety
- Good Man, Bad Woman
- The Woman Who Blamed Life on a Spaniard
- Secret Man
- What They Call Red Cherry Pie
- Hieroglyphica
- The Drum-Majors in the Labor Day Parade
- Polo Ponies Practicing
- The Widow
- Lytton Strachey, Also, Enters into Heaven
- Agenda
- Table Talk
- A Room on a Garden
- Owl’s Clover
- Communications of Meaning
- One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozels
- Outside of Wedlock
- Desire & the Object
- This as Including That
- Tradition
- Memorandum
- First Warmth
- As You Leave the Room
PLAYS
- Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise
- Carlos Among the Candles
- Bowl, Cat and Broomstick
THE NECESSARY ANGEL: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
- The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words
- The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet
- Three Academic Pieces
- About One of Marianne Moore’s Poems
- Effects of Analogy
- Imagination as Value
- The Relations Between Poetry and Painting
UNCOLLECTED PROSE
- The Thessalians
- A Day in February
- Editorials on the Fence Question
- Four Characters
- Cattle Kings of Florida
- On “The Emperor of Ice Cream,”
- Williams
- Response to an Enquiry (1934)
- Martha Champion
- A Poet That Matters
- In Memory of Harriet Monroe
- The Irrational Element in Poetry
- Insurance and Social Change
- Surety and Fidelity Claims
- Response to an Enquiry (1937)
- A Note on Poetry
- Homage to T.S. Eliot
- Notes on Jean Labasque
- The Situation in American Writing: Seven Questions
- Concerning a Chair of Poetry
- Note for This Is My Best
- Epitaphiana
- Introduction to Samuel French Morse’s Time of Year
- “There was a mother chicken,”
- A Ceremony
- Response to an Enquiry (1946)
- Rubbings of Reality
- Homage to Henry Church
- The Shaper
- John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean
- The State of American Writing
- A Comment on Meaning in Poetry
- Marcel Gromaire
- Response to an Enquiry
- Three Paraphrases from Léon-Paul Fargue
- On Receiving the Gold Medal from the Poetry Society of America
- On Receiving the National Book Award for Poetry (1951)
- On Receiving an Honorary Degree from Bard College
- Two or Three Ideas
- A Collect of Philosophy
- A Note on “Les Plus Belles Pages,”
- Raoul Dufy
- Autobiographical Statement for the New York Herald-Tribune Book Review
- The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons
- On Receiving the National Book Award for Poetry (1955)
- A Footnote to Saul Bellow’s “Pains and Gains,”
- On Walt Whitman
- Two Prefaces
- Connecticut Composed
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS
- Untitled note (sonnet titles)
- Schemata
- from Adagia
- from Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets
- Materia Poetica
- “Gaiety in poetry is a precious characteristic …”
- “There are two arch-types of poets …”
JOURNALS AND LETTERS
- December 27, 1898
- June 15, 1900
- March 11, 1901
- August 10, 1902
- September 3, 1903
- To Elsie Moll, January 21, 1909
- To Elsie Moll, March 18, 1909
- To Harriet Monroe, April 25, 1920
- To Alice Corbin Henderson, March 27, 1922
- To Alice Corbin Henderson, November 27, 1922
- To Marianne Moore, November 19, 1925
- To William Carlos Williams, September 7, 1927
- To Ronald Lane Latimer, November 26, 1935
- To Leonard C. van Geyzel, December 31, 1937
- To C. L. Daughtry, November 24, 1941
- To William Carlos Williams, January 22, 1942
- To Harvey Breit, August 8, 1942
- To Jane MacFarland Stone, November 2, 1943
- To José Rodríguez Feo, June 20, 1945
- To Charles Norman, November 9, 1945
- To Allen Tate, April 6, 1948
- To Thomas McGreevy, December 8, 1948
- To Barbara Church, April 27, 1950
- To Robert Pack, December 28, 1954
- To Samuel French Morse, July 5, 1955
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes
Index of Poem Titles and First Lines
Index of Prose Titles

30.00 List Price: $45.00 (Save: 33%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #200982

ISBN: 978-1-88301145-1 1030 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 96 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume Two: E.E. Cummings to May Swenson LOA N°116

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays LOA N°81

Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters LOA N°180

American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker LOA N°115

American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry & Prose

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.