The poetry of Wallace Stevens has inspired generations of poets of every school. Here, for the first time, is assembled an astonishing variety of poems, by a full range of poets, inspired by Stevens’s life and work. In its own way, each poem exhibits the torque and feel of his poetry, yet each also is deeply personal and conveys how meaningful Stevens was and remains for poets and poetry.

Whether whimsical or serious, solemn or light, the poems in Dennis Barone and James Finnegan’s Visiting Wallace are sure to inspire delight and thought. Alan Filreis’s brilliant foreword asks us to consider whether there is another modern poet who means as much to contemporary verse as Stevens: “seventy-six poems giving us seventy-six distinct Stevenses to follow and succeed.”

Dennis Barone is a professor of English and American studies at St. Joseph College in West Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of numerous books of fiction and poetry and editor of three volumes. James Finnegan is an executive with Lee & Mason Financial Services in Farmington, Connecticut. Alan Filreis is the Kelly Professor of English and the faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania.