Rock, The

thumb|right|335 px The image of the rock first appeared in the poem "Credences of Summer" in 1947.  It is a crucial image in Stevens' later poems.  In the Collected Poems, "the image of the rock is fully formed as one of the final images of Being itself" (1).  It is "a figure of the all-inclusive and yet difficult realization of the source or center" (1)
The Rock is also a collection of 25 of Stevens' later poems (published 1954).  "Included in this section are some of Stevens's finest and most characteristically abstract poems" (2). Stevens first thought to call this section "Amber Umber" but ultimately chose The Rock as its title. 
==Poems Appearing in The Rock==
An Old Man Asleep                             
The Irish Cliffs of Moher
The Plain Sense of Things
One of the Inhabitants of the West
Lebenweisheitspielerei
The Hermitage at the Center
The Green Plant
Madame La Fleure
To an Old Philosopher in Rome
Vacancy in the Park
The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain
Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make It
   The Constant Disquisition of the Wind
  The World is Larger in Summer
Prologues to What is Possible
Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly
Song of Fixed Accord
The World as Meditation
Long and Sluggish Lines
A Quiet Normal Life
Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
The Rock
   Seventy Years Later
  The Poem as Icon
  Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn
St. Armorer's Church From the Outside
Note on Moonlight
The Planet on the Table
The River of Rivers in Connecticut
Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
==References==
*1. Hines, Thomas Jensen. The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parrallels with Husserl and Heidegger. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1976. 216 -226.
*2   Library of America: Wallace Stevens
*3. Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank  Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.