The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
FIRST EDITION, SIGNED AND DATED BY WALLACE STEVENS on front free endpaper: “Wallace Stevens, Hartford, Nov. 6, 1954.”.
“It was not until 1954 that Stevens agreed to the publication of his collected poems, the idea being that the book’s appearance should coincide with his seventy-fifth birthday which fell on 2 October of that year. Even then he was not particularly happy about the prospect… He knew, however, that there was now no alternative. The poems that made up The Rock section of the Collected Poems were not enough to constitute a whole new volume, and, in spite of what he must have recognized as the undimmed quality of these twenty-five poems, among which there is hardly a failure, he was aware that he was tiring.”
The classic collection of Stevens’s poetry – including the new poems in the final section titled The Rock – was the culmination of his life’s work. Issued in a limited (unsigned) edition of only 2500 number copies, Collected Poems was awarded Winner of both the 1955 Pulitzer Prize and the 1955 National Book Award for Poetry. Stevens would pass away less than a year later, on August 2, 1955.
Signed copies are famously rare, and this copy is particularly interesting. It is signed “Wallace Stevens, Hartford” and dated “Nov. 6, 1954”. On the evening of November 6, 1954, Stevens gave a reading of his poetry at the 92nd Street Y in New York, implying either he signed the copy in Hartford earlier in the day or, more intriguingly, identified himself as “Wallace Stevens, Hartford” uniting himself with the city with which he was so closely linked.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954. Octavo, original red/brown decorated cloth, original dust jacket; custom box. With iconic photograph of Stevens by Sylvia Salmi as frontispiece and on front panel of jacket. Light general wear to cloth (text fine), jacket with fading to spine (as often) and a touch of restoration at a few extreme edges. The classic Stevens collection, very rare signed.
Price: $5,500 .