Now, at seventy-five, as I look back on the little that I have done and as I turn the pages of my own poems gathered together in a single volume, I have no choice except to paraphrase the old verse that says that it is not what I am, but what I aspired to be that comforts me. It is not what I have written but what I should like to have written that constitutes my true poems, the uncollected poems which I have not had the strength to realize. These words proclaim not only Stevens' imperious modesty, but the central being and import of his works: that, as in its totality it forever projected an" ultimate poem," the ground of all poetry, the assured existence of the possibility of poetry, it was the work" of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice."