The Collected Poems--the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called "the best and most representative American poet"--was originally published by Knopf in 1954. Because the book was rushed into print to coincide with Stevens"s 75th birthday, Knopf relied on recent printings of Stevens" other titles, which had accumulated many errors through years of resetting and reprinting. The result was a collection with errors in wording, punctuation, and spelling, along with missing stanza breaks, misplaced lines, and incorrect titles--and there was even an entire poem left out by accident. Some of the mistakes had significant effects on meaning: "Sour wine to warm him" became "Sour wine to warn him," for instance, and one book of Stevens criticism spent two pages discussing the image of an angel "Serenely gazing at the violent abyss," when it should have been "violet." Stevens scholars John Serio and Christopher Beyers have painstakingly compared multiple versions of all the...