The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955.xa0xa0Although 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 sepcial 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 Frued Morse; a new, revised, and corrected edition by Milton J. Bates, 1989).xa0xa0Mr. Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949.xa0xa0In 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.xa0xa0From 1916 on, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice president in 1934. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Snow Man One must have a mind of winterTo regard the frost and the boughsOf the pine-trees crusted with snow;And have been cold a long timeTo behold the junipers shagged with ice,The spruces rough in the distant glitterOf the January sun; and not to thinkOf any misery in the sound of the wind,In the sound of a few leaves,Which is the sound of the landFull of the same windThat is blowing in the same bare placeFor the listener, who listens in the snow,And, nothing himself, beholdsNothing that is not there and the nothing that is.