Wallace Stevens lived a full life. While in school, he was on the football team, played guitar, and sang in the choir. He became a lawyer for an insurance company, a husband, and a father. Deep down, he considered himself a poet. Stevens began writing poetry at an early age and continued to do so throughout his life, and is now considered one of America's greatest and most influential poets. The twenty-five works in this collection demonstrate Stevens' special love of poetry and nature. You can almost see in his words the delicate colors of the wildflowers and hear the wind rustling through the trees. Night arrives "striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks" or is "the color / Of a woman's arm." Light "is like a spider" that "crawls under your eyelids"; leaves twist in the wind "as the flames / Turned in the fire."

John N. Serio is Professor of Humanities at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York Even though Robert Gantt Steele trained to become an architect, what he really loved to do as a child was to draw and paint. He has recently designed and built a new home for his wife Alice, daughter Catherine, and son Tyler, but he spends most of his time as a book illustrator. He is fond of reading history and is also an enthusiastic amateur musician