Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction, book reviews, and critical essays appear regularly in magazines and online. In the following essay, Witcover discusses history and technique in this poem.

Wallace Stevens gives hope to late-bloomers everywhere. His first collection of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923, when he was fortyfour years old. His second collection, Ideas of Order, did not appear until eleven years later, in 1934. Yet by the time of his death in 1955, Stevens had received virtually every major award and honor the literary community could bestow and was widely acknowledged not only as one of the great poets of the century, but, in the words of critic Harold Bloom in Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, "a vital part of American mythology."

Not bad for a man who spent his entire adult life laboring as a lawyer for insurance companies! It seems paradoxical...