Pulitzer Prize Poetry Winner

Collected Poems

by Wallace Stevens

Summary

Stevens's career-spanning volume circles his great theme: the mind's restless argument with reality and the supreme fictions we make to live by. The poems are abstract, musical, and philosophically rigorous, marrying baroque diction to a rigorous modernist skepticism. The book stands as one of the central monuments of twentieth-century American poetry.

Historical Context & Significance

Stevens famously worked as an insurance executive in Hartford while writing some of the most abstract poetry in the English language.