Selected Poems

A beautiful new edition—the first in nearly twenty years—of the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry and an unending source of fascination to scholars, students, and the general reader. As John N. Serio reminds us in his elegant introduction, Stevens has written more persuasively than any other poet about the significance of poetry itself: “The imagination—frequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevens—is what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality.”

This rich and thorough selection—published in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens’s birth—carries us from the explosion of Harmonium in 1923 to the maturity of The Auroras of Autumn in 1950 and the magesterial Collected Poems published by Knopf in 1954. To be drawn in once more by “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to name only a few, is to experience anew the
mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world.

A significant addition to the Borzoi Poetry series—an essential volume for all readers of poetry.