The Rock

In 1955, shortly before his death, Wallace Stevens earned the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. The collection gathered most of his life's work, and featured 25 previously unpublished poems. Stevens imagined that those poems would stand alone as their own volume--The Rock. Featuring some of his most memorable poems, including "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself," The Rock is an excellent introduction to one of American's most brilliant beloved modernist poets.

III

Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn

The rock is the gray particular of a man's life,

The stone from which he rises, up--and--ho,

The step to the bleaker depths of his descents . . .

The rock is the stern particular of the air,

The mirror of the planets, one by one,

But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright

With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;

The difficult rightness of half-risen day.