Stevens' debut, written by a Hartford insurance executive in his spare time, is among the most purely pleasurable collections in American poetry. "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" established a voice that was philosophical, musical, and drenched in color. Stevens asked the hardest question: can a secular person, having lost God, still live with beauty? His answer was yes, and the answer was poetry itself.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.