“Sunday Morning” - a poem to rival Eliot’s “The Wasteland” - and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” featured prominently in Stevens’ major collection Harmonium. The book was a commercial flop, however, selling no more than a few hundred copies, and for the next half dozen years Stevens turned away from poetry and focussed on becoming the best vice-president of insurance he could be. He remains a poet for the ages.

Wallace Stevens