Delightful harmony and boundless imagination: these characteristics make Wallace Stevens’ work very special, and perfect for children. Twenty-seven of his finest verses, evocatively illustrated, provide the perfect introduction to Stevens’ poetry. “From a Junk” reveals a boat at sea in the moonlight that “burns...and glistens, wide and wide, under the five-horned stars of night.” A little girl—“sweeter than the sound of the willow”—proudly dressed in her Sunday best accompanies the child-centered “Song.” From the farm landscape of “Ploughing on Sunday” to the three delicate dancing figures of “The Plot Against the Giant,” each picture and each poem will delight. John N. Serio is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He has published essays and books on Wallace Stevens and has served as editor of The Wallace Stevens Journal for over twenty years. Robert Gantt Steele has been an illustrator for 20 years. His commissions include several book covers, work for the Smithsonian magazine, and the poster image for the most recent Broadway revival of Showboat.
Author
Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.
