The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by STEVENS, Wallace (1879-1955) - 1955

London: Faber and Faber, 1955. First Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. First UK Edition of the definitive collection of poems from "the best and most representative American poet."(Harold Bloom) Thick demy 8vo (235 x 151mm): xv,[1],534,v,[1]pp, with photographic portrait frontispiece. Publisher's original gray S cloth, spine stamped in gold; blueish-green dust jacket printed in maroon and black, priced 42s. Neat owner's name, dated Nov. 1955, on fly-leaf. Virtually pristine copy aside from offsetting to end papers from jacket flaps; vibrant, completely unfaded jacket with odd nick or two. Scarce thus. Edelstein A23.a.8. The Collected Poems, originally published a year earlier, in New York, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The U. S. edition was rushed into print to honor Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, and is rife with errors, as is this first UK edition, which was printed by offset from the first American printing. With few exceptions, all of the poems are here (save "Owl's Clover," "The Woman Who Had More Babies Than That," and "Life on a Battleship"), from Harmonium, Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, Transport Summer, and The Auroras of Autumn, including the poem some consider the best short poem in the English language, "The Snow Man," and my own favorite, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Here too are "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," and The Comedian as the Letter C." Stevens also added 25 poems (only six of previously appeared in book form) under the title, The Rock. "Included in this section are some of Stevens's finest and most characteristically abstract poems. Appropriately, the final poem in The Rock is entitled 'Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,' in which reality and the imagination are depicted as fusing at the instant of perception: 'That scrawny cry—it was / A chorister whose c preceded the choir. / It was part of the colossal sun, / Surrounded by its choral rings, / Still far away. It was like / A new knowledge of reality.'" (Poetry Foundation) N. B. With few exceptions (always identified), we only stock books in exceptional condition, with dust jackets carefully preserved in archival, removable mylar sleeves. All orders are packaged with care and posted promptly. Satisfaction guaranteed. (Fine Editions Ltd is a member of the Independent Online Booksellers Association, and we subscribe to its codes of ethics.).