Wallace Stevens : Collected Poetry and Prose (Library of America)
Born in Pennsylvania in 1879, Wallace Stevens spent his adult  life working in the rigorously non-poetic insurance business. Yet his  poetry, most of which he wrote after his 50th birthday, is anything but  mundane. Rather, Stevens stuffed his work with the brilliant bric-a-brac of a dozen cultures, celebrating (for example) the "dark  Brazilians in their cafes,/Musing immaculate, pampean dits" or the  way "that old Chinese/Sat tittivating by their mountain pools/Or  in the Yangtse studied out their beards." Stevens wasn't, however,  a simple collector of souvenirs. A magpie with a mission, he used the  peculiar music of his poetry to investigate grand philosophical  dilemmas. What was the distinction between appearance and reality? Does  an aesthetic artifact such as a poem bring us any closer to the real?  (He seemed to answer the latter question, at least provisionally, by  declaring that "the poem is the cry of its occasion/Part of the  res itself and not about it.") TheCollected Poetry & Prosebrings together all of Stevens's published books, including such  classic poems as "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Sunday Morning," and  "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." There's also a generous  sampling of his essays, speeches, letters, and miscellaneous prose.  These riches confirm the enormous reach of Stevens's imagination, but  they also remind us that for all his internationalism, he remained very  much a product of his native soil. As he confessed in a 1948 letter,  "I like to hold on to anything that seems to have a definite  American past even though the American trees may be growing by the side  of queer Parthenons set, say, in the neighborhood of Niagara  Falls."