Opus Posthumous Poems, Plays, Prose

When Opus Posthumous first appeared in 1957, it was an appropriate capstone to the career of one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. It included many poems missing from Stevens's Collected Poems, along with Stevens's characteristically inventive prose and pieces for the theater. Now Milton J. Bates, the author of the acclaimed Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, has edited and revised Opus Posthumous to correct the previous edition's errors and to incorporate material that has come to light since original publication. A third of the poems and essays in this edition are new to the volume. The resulting book is an invaluable literary document whose language and insights are fresh, startling, and eloquent.

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955.  Although he had contributed to the <b>Harvard Advocate</b> while in college, he began to gain general recognition only when Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a sepcial 1914 wartime issue of <b>Poetry</b>.  <b>Harmonium</b>, his first volume of poems, was published in 1923, and was followed by <b>Ideas of Order</b> (1936), <b>The Man with the Blue Guitar</b> (1937), <b>Parts of a World</b> (1942), <b>Transport to Summer</b> (1947), <b>The Auroras of Autumn</b> (1950), <b>The Necessary Angel</b> (a volume of essays, 1951), <b>The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens</b> (1954), and <b>Opus Posthumous</b> (first published in 1957, edited by Samuel Frued Morse; a new, revised, and corrected edition by Milton J. Bates, 1989).  Mr. Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949.  In 1951 he won the National Book Award in Poetry for <b>The Auroras of Autumn</b>, in 1955 he won it a second time for <b>The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens</b>, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1955.  From 1916 on, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice president in 1934.