
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.
Books

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
2023

The Snow Man
2012

Anecdote of the Jar
2012

Wallace Stevens
1950

Harmonium
1923

The Palm at the End of the Mind
Selected Poems and a Play
1971

Stevens
Poems
1947

Ideas of Order
1936

The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems
1937

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
1954

Parts of a World
1951

Wallace Stevens
Collected Poetry & Prose
1997

The Rock
1954

The Blue Guitar
Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso
1977

Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens
2009

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
2012

The Emperor of Ice-Cream and Other Poems
1999

Opus Posthumous
Poems, Plays, Prose
1957

The Auroras of Autumn
1947

Six American Poets
An Anthology
1991

Sunday Morning
2012

The Voice of the Poet
Wallace Stevens
2002

Letters of Wallace Stevens
1966

The Necessary Angel
Essays on Reality and the Imagination
1951

Poetry for Young People
Wallace Stevens
2004

Aforismos completos
2002