Although I resisted the Library of America's Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose for many years due to an emotional attachment to my tattered old editions of The Collected Poems, The Palm at the End of the Mind, The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words, and the Letters, I have come to feel that the LOA edition deserves to become the enchiridion for all who wish to learn to "speak" Stevens. That is, for those who wish to study his work carefully, chronologically, and comprehensively, if not completely--the better to absorb him and to make his vocabulary and poetic sensibility a part of one's own.
Stevens was, and remains, a difficult poet. But the blade of the intellect is sharpened upon the whetstone of difficult texts. To become learned in Stevens is to catechize oneself in the Religion of Beauty. Around Stevens, one should read Ruskin and Pater, Santayana and Proust, Hemingway, Nietzsche, Joyce, Nabokov, Kenneth Burke, Whitman, Emerson, Oscar Wilde and, eventually, Lucretius, Rumi and Kabir, and much else besides.
Nevertheless, allow the LOA Stevens to serve as an anchor to the rest of your reading and you will not lose your way in the labyrinth.
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