Selected Poems

A beautiful new editionthe first in nearly twenty yearsof the work of Wallace Stevens, a founding father of contemporary American poetry, with a dazzling range of work that is at once emotional and intellectual. 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 in everyday life: "The imaginationfrequently synonymous with the act of the mind, or poetry, for Stevensis what gives life its savor, its sanction, its sacred quality." This rich and thorough selectionpublished in the 130th anniversary year of Stevens's birthcarries us from the explosion ofHarmoniumin 1923 to the maturity ofThe Auroras of Autumnin 1950 and the magisterialCollected Poemspublished 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 again the mystery of a poet who calls us to a higher music and to a deeper understanding of our vast and inarticulate interior world. This essential volume for all readers of poetry reminds us of Stevens's nearly unparalleled contribution to the art form and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.

Introduction
 
What can one say about a poet who writes, quite tenderly, “And for what, except for you, do I feel love?” and who does not mean his wife, or his daughter, or any other person, but rather an imaginary figure: the muse? But that is how Wallace Stevens begins the prologue to what many consider his greatest poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”—with a passionate, intimate address not to a beloved but to an intangible concept: inspiration. With something approaching erotic fervor, Stevens personifies an abstraction and speaks directly to poetry, as if it were his lover:
 
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
 
No other poet I know of has written so elegantly and so persuasively about the beauty and significance of poetry in everyday life. We find these declarations not only in Stevens’s poems but also in his essays, most of which originated as invited lectures on the subject of poetry. In these essays, Stevens seduces us with his enchanting prose to believe in the spiritual importance of poetry. 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. In a passage from “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” he stresses the importance of poetic language by evoking our human craving for the sound of words:
 
“The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them.”
 
Noting that the imagination (poetry) must be based on reality, and furthermore that the interdependence of the imagination and reality is crucial, Stevens goes on to isolate poetry’s inherent distinctiveness: It bestows nobility, a quality he defines as “our spiritual height and depth.” Nobility emerges from the press of the imagination against a world that seems chaotic, crass, violent, and banal. The task of the poet is to transmit his imaginative power to others. Stevens sees the poet fulfilling himself “only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others.” Simply put, the poet’s role “is to help people to live their lives.”
 
One could cite other essays that make Stevens’s case for poetry, but the real question is: How well does his own poetry measure up to his ideal? After all, the telling phrase in the opening line of the invocation to “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is “except for you.” Since the “you” refers to the creative faculty of the mind, it excludes everything else, including, of course, people. At the very least, such devotion to art rather than another person might strike a reader as odd. It has certainly struck many readers as cold and impersonal. With such observations as the following, Stevens has done little to alter that impression: “Life is not people and scene but thought and feeling;” “Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble;” “I have no life except in poetry.”
 
There is an abstract feature to much of Stevens’s poetry that distinguishes it from that of most other poets. Modern lyric poets, for example, usually write about more tangible topics, often using the first-person singular. One thinks of the speaker contrasting his neighbor’s vi

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Excerpted from Selected Poems by Wallace Stevens
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