In its December 2006 issue, the Atlantic Monthly published a sidebar naming the five most “influential poets” in American history. Wallace Stevens was on that list. Here is what the Atlantic had to say:

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
As poetry retreated into the academy, Stevens emerged as the dominant figure of the twentieth century. His influence is at once very deep and very narrow. Scholars and poets know his work inside out, but many educated people haven’t even heard of him. The poems are dense, highly wrought, and full of other-worldly beauty - a necessary corrective to the Williams-esque plain style. But his work also has a hothouse, overintellectualized quality, which has endeared it to the academy and which contemporary poets would do well to purge.

Once again, I can only be thankful that my contemporaries remain deaf to such words.

Full text of the poem:

A Woman Sings a Song for a Soldier Come Home

The would kills that does not bleed.
It has no nurse nor kin to know
Nor kin to care.

And the man dies that does not fall.
He walks and dies. Nothing survives
Except what was,

Under the white clouds piled and piled
Like gathered-up forgetfulness,
In sleeping air.

The clouds are over the village, the town,
To which the walker speaks
And tells of his wound,

Without a word to the people, unless
One person should come by chance,
This man or that,

So much a part of the place, so little
A person he knows, with whom he might
Talk of the weather -

And let it go, with nothing lost,
Just out of the village, at its edge,
In the quiet there.

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