Wallace Stevens - Poetry, Plays, Prose & Letters (4 books)

WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955) was one of the great American poets of the 20th century. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. Harold Bloom called Stevens "the best and most representative American poet of our time."

Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his COLLECTED POEMS in 1955. The volume contains "Harmonium" (1923); "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); and "The Rock".

OPUS POSTHUMOUS (1957) includes many poems missing from the Collected Poems, along with Stevens' characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater.

Stevens was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. In THE NECESSARY ANGEL (1951), a collection of his prose works, he articulated his poetic notions without resorting to abstraction and obfuscation. In the essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," he addressed the imagination's response to adversity, and in 'The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," he championed the imagination as the medium toward a reality transcending mere action and rationalization.

The LETTERS are brilliant, subtle, and illuminating. His famous criterion for poetry -- "It should give pleasure" -- informed his epistolary aesthetic as well; these letters stimulate one's appetite for poetry as they valorize the imagination and the senses. They also offer fascinating glimpses of Stevens as family man, insurance executive, connoisseur, and friend.


The following books are in PDF format:

* THE COLLECTED POEMS (Knopf, 1971). Also in ePUB format!

* LETTERS OF WALLACE STEVENS (Knopf, 1966). Edited by Holly Stevens.

* THE NECESSARY ANGEL: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Knopf, 1951).

* OPUS POSTHUMOUS: Poems, Plays, Prose (Knopf, 1966). Edited with an Introduction by Samuel French Morse.