1. Wallace Stevens
2. Wallace Stevens Summary

The Wallace Stevens Society promotes the study of Wallace Stevens' poetry through the publication of The Wallace Stevens Journal. Membership in the Society comes with a subscription to the Journal, which is published for the Society by The Johns Hopkins University Press. The Society also arranges conferences and. Journal entry (20 June 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies: the Young Wallace Stevens (1977) edited by Holly Stevens, Ch. A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light. Journal entry (26 July 1899); as published in Souvenirs and Prophecies:. Terrance Hayes, “Snow for Wallace Stevens” No one living a snowed-in life can sleep without a blindfold. Light is the lion that comes down to drink.

Wallace Stevens is one of America’s most respected 20th century poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him “the best and most representative American poet of our time.”
Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His family belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church and when Stevens became eligible he enrolled in parochial schools. Stevens’s father contributed substantially to the son’s early education by providing their home with an extensive library and by encouraging reading. At age 12 Stevens entered public school for boys and began studying classics in Greek and Latin. In high school he became a prominent student, scoring high marks and distinguishing himself as a skillful orator. He also showed early promise as a writer by reporting for the school’s newspaper, and after completing his studies in Reading he decided to continue his literary pursuits at Harvard University.
Encouraged by his father, Stevens devoted himself to the literary aspects of Harvard life. By his sophomore year he wrote regularly for the Harvard Advocate, and by the end of his third year, as biographer Samuel French Morse noted in Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life, he had received all of the school’s honors for writing. In 1899 Stevens joined the editorial board of the Advocate’s rival publication, the Harvard Monthly, and the following year he assumed the board’s presidency and became editor. By that time Stevens had already published poems in both the Advocate and the Monthly, and as editor he also produced stories and literary sketches. Because there was a frequent shortage of material during his tenure as editor, Stevens often published several of his own works in each issue of the Monthly. He was recognized on campus as a prolific and multitalented writer. Unfortunately, his campus literary endeavors ended in 1900 when a shortage of family funds necessitated his withdrawal from the university.
Leaving Harvard was hardly a setback, though, for Stevens was not working towards a college degree and was not particularly invigorated by the school’s literary environment. Once out of Harvard, Stevens decided to work as a journalist, and shortly thereafter he began reporting for the New York Evening Post. He published regularly in the newspaper, but found the work dull and inconsequential. The job proved most worthwhile as a means for Stevens to acquaint himself with New York City. Each day he explored various areas and then recorded his observations in a journal. In the evenings he either attended theatrical and musical productions or remained in his room writing poems or drafting a play.
Stevens soon tired of this life, however, and questioned his father on the possibility of abandoning the newspaper position to entirely devote himself to literature. But his father, while a lover of literature, was also prudent, and he counseled his son to cease writing and study the law. Stevens heeded the advice, and he attended the New York School of Law from 1901 to 1904. He then worked briefly in a law partnership with former Harvard classmate Lyman Ward. After parting from Ward, Stevens worked for various law firms in New York City. In 1908 he accepted a post with the American Bonding Company, an insurance firm, and he stayed with the company when it was purchased by the Fidelity and Deposit Company.
Stevens’s early years with the insurance firm brought great personal change. Financially secure, he proposed marriage to Elsie Viola Kachel, who accepted and became his wife in September 1909. Two years later Stevens’s father died, and in 1912 his mother also died. During this period Stevens apparently wrote no poetry, but he involved himself in New York City’s artistic community through his association with several writers, including poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Stevens was keenly interested in the art exhibitions at the city’s many museums and galleries. He developed a fondness for modern painting, eventually becoming a connoisseur and collector of Asian art, including painting, pottery, and jewelry. He particularly admired Asian works for their vivid colors and their precision and clarity, qualities that he later imparted to his own art.
By 1913 Stevens was enjoying great success in the field of insurance law. Unlike many aspiring artists he was hardly stifled by steady employment. He soon resumed writing poetry, though in a letter to his wife he confided that writing was “absurd” as well as fulfilling. In 1914 he nonetheless published two poems in the modest periodical Trend, and four more verses for Harriet Monroe’s publication, Poetry. None of these poems were included in Stevens’s later volumes, but they are often considered his first mature writings.
After he began publishing his poems Stevens changed jobs again, becoming resident vice president, in New York City, of the Equitable Surety Company (which became the New England Equitable Company). He left that position in 1916 to work for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed for the rest of his life, becoming vice president in 1934.
This period of job changes was also one of impressive literary achievements for Stevens. In 1915 he produced his first important poems, “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning,” and in 1916 he published his prizewinning play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Another play, Carlos among the Candles, followed in 1917, and the comic poem “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” appeared in 1918. During the next few years Stevens began organizing his poems for publication in a single volume. For inclusion in that prospective volume he also produced several longer poems, including the masterful “The Comedian as the Letter C.” This poem, together with the early “Sunday Morning” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” proved key to Stevens’s volume Harmonium when it was published in 1923.
Harmonium bears ample evidence of Stevens’s wide-ranging talents: an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize. “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” among the earliest poems in Harmonium, contains aspects of all these skills. In this poem, a beautiful woman’s humiliating encounter with lustful elders becomes a meditation on the nature of beauty (and the beauty of nature). Stevens vividly captures the woman’s plight by dramatically contrasting the tranquility of her bath with a jarring interruption by several old folk. Consistent with the narrator’s contention that “music is feeling,” the woman’s plight is emphasized by descriptions of sounds from nature and musical instruments. The poem culminates in a reflection on the permanence of the woman’s physical beauty, which, it is declared, exists forever in memory and through death in the union of body and nature: “The body dies; the body’s beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going, / A wave, interminably flowing.”
“Peter Quince at the Clavier,” with its notion of immortality as a natural cycle, serves as a prelude to the more ambitious “Sunday Morning,” in which cyclical nature is proposed as the sole alternative to Christianity in the theologically bankrupt 20th century. Here Stevens echoes the theme of “Peter Quince at the Clavier” by writing that “death is the mother of beauty,” thus confirming that physical beauty is immortal through death and the consequent consummation with nature. “Sunday Morning” ends by stripping the New Testament’s Jesus Christ of transcendence and consigning him, too, to immortality void of an afterlife but part of “the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish.” In this manner “Sunday Morning” shatters the tenets, or illusion, of Christianity essentially, the spiritual afterlife—and substantiates nature—the joining of corpse to earth as the only channel to immortality. In her volume Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston described the replacement of Christianity with nature as the essence of the poem, and she called “Sunday Morning” the “revelation of a secular religion.”
Less profound, perhaps, but no less impressive are Harmonium’s comedic highlights, “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” the narrator, a middle-aged poet, delivers an extended, rather flamboyantly embellished, monologue to love in all its embodiments and evocations. He reflects on his own loves and ambitions in such carefree detail that the work seems an amusing alternative to T.S. Eliot’s pessimistic poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Like “Sunday Morning,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” celebrates change, and it suggests that even in fluctuation there is definition—“that fluttering things have so distinct a shade.”
In the mock epic “Comedian as the Letter C” Stevens presents a similarly introspective protagonist, Crispin, who is, or has been, a poet, handyman, musician, and rogue. The poem recounts Crispin’s adventures from France to the jungle to a lush, Eden-like land where he establishes his own colony and devotes himself to contemplating his purpose in life. During the course of his adventures Crispin evolves from romantic to realist and from poet to parent, the latter two roles being, according to the poem, mutually antagonistic. The poem ends with Crispin dourly viewing his six daughters as poems and questioning the validity of creating anything that must, eventually, become separate from him.
“The Comedian as the Letter C” is a fairly complex work, evincing Stevens’s impressive, and occasionally intimidating, vocabulary and his penchant for obscure humor. Stevens later declared that his own motivations in writing the poem derived from his enthusiasm for “words and sounds.” He stated: “I suppose that I ought to confess that by the letter C I meant the sound of the letter C; what was in my mind was to play on that sound throughout the poem. While the sound of that letter has more or less variety ... all its shades maybe said to have a comic aspect. Consequently, the letter C is a comedian.”
Although these poems are perhaps the most substantial in Harmonium, they are hardly the volume’s only noteworthy ones. Also among the more than 50 poems that comprise Stevens’s first book are “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” an imagistic poem highly reminiscent of haiku, and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” an eloquent exhortation that death is an inevitable aspect of living. These and the other entries in Harmonium reveal Stevens as a poet of delicate, but determined, sensibility, one whose perspective is precise without being precious, and whose wit is subtle but not subdued. Harriet Monroe, founder and first editor of Poetry, reviewed Harmonium for her own periodical: “The delight which one breathes like a perfume from the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the natural effluence of his own clear and untroubled and humorously philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are.”
Few critics of the time, however, shared Monroe’s enthusiasm, or even her familiarity with Harmonium. The book was ignored in most critical quarters, and dismissed as a product of mere dilettantism by some of the few reviewers that acknowledged Stevens’s art. Although apparently undaunted by the poor reception accorded Harmonium, Stevens produced only a few poems during the next several years. Part of this unproductiveness was attributed by Stevens to the birth of his daughter, Holly, in 1924. Like his autobiographical character Crispin, Stevens found that parenting thwarted writing. In a letter to Harriet Monroe he noted that the responsibilities of parenthood were a “terrible blow to poor literature.”

In 1933, nine years after his daughter’s birth, Stevens finally resumed writing steadily. The following year he published his second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, and in 1935 he produced an expanded edition of that same work. The poems of Ideas of Order are, generally, sparer and gloomier than those of Harmonium. Prominent among these bleak works is “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” comprised of 50 verses on subjects such as aging and dying. Perhaps in reference to these 50 short verses, the racist title refers to the litter that, in Stevens’s opinion, accumulated in blacks’ cemeteries. He ends this poem by noting the futility of attempts to thwart nature and by commending those individuals who adapt to change: “Union of the weakest develops strength / Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge / One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? / But the wise avenges by building his city in snow.”
Stevens more clearly explicated his notion of creative imagination in “The Idea of Order in Key West,” among the few invigorating poems in Ideas of Order and one of the most important works in his entire canon. In this poem Stevens wrote of strolling along the beach with a friend and discovering a girl singing to the ocean. Stevens declares that the girl has created order out of chaos by fashioning a sensible song from her observations of the swirling sea. The concluding stanza extolls the virtues of the singer’s endeavor (“The maker’s rage to order words of the sea”) and declares that the resulting song is an actual aspect of the singer. In his book Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem, Frank Doggett called the concluding stanza Stevens’s “hymn to the ardor of the poet to give order to the world by his command of language.”
Following the publication of Ideas of Order Stevens began receiving increasing recognition as an important and unique poet. Not all of that recognition, however, was entirely positive. Some critics charged that the obscurity, abstraction, and self-contained, art-for-art’s-sake tenor of his work were inappropriate and ineffective during a time of international strife that included widespread economic depression and increasing fascism in Europe. Stevens, comfortably ensconced in his half-acre home in Hartford, responded that the world was improving, not degenerating further. He held himself relatively detached from politics and world affairs, although he briefly championed leading Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, and contended that his art actually constituted the most substantial reality. “Life is not people and scene,” he argued, “but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself.”
Stevens contended that the poet’s purpose was to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through the imagination. Like his alter ego Crispin, Stevens became preoccupied with articulating his perception of the poet’s purpose, and he sought to explore that theme in his 1936 book, Owl’s Clover. But that book comprised of five explications of various individuals’ relations to art proved verbose and thus uncharacteristically excessive. Immensely displeased, Stevens immediately dismantled the volume and reshaped portions of the work for inclusion in a forthcoming collection.
That volume, The Man with the Blue Guitar, succeeded where Owl’s Clover failed, presenting a varied, eloquently articulated contention of the same theme the poet, and therefore the imagination, as the explicator of thought and feeling that had undone him earlier. In the title poem Stevens defends the poet’s responsibility to shape and define perceived reality: “They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.’ / The man replied, ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.’” For Stevens, the blue guitar was the power of imagination, and the power of imagination, in turn, was “the power of the mind over the possibility of things” and “the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal.”
The Man with the Blue Guitar, particularly the 33-part title poem, constituted a breakthrough for Stevens by indicating a new direction: an inexhaustive articulation of the imagination as the supreme perception and of poetry as the supreme fiction. Harold Bloom, in acknowledging Stevens’s debacle Owl’s Clover, described The Man with the Blue Guitar as the poet’s “triumph over ... literary anxieties” and added that with its completion Stevens renewed his poetic aspirations and vision. “The poet who had written The Man with the Blue Guitar had weathered his long crisis,” Bloom wrote, “and at fifty-eight was ready to begin again.”
In subsequent volumes Stevens single-mindedly concentrated on his idea of poetry as the perfect synthesis of reality and the imagination. Consequently, much of his poetry is about poetry. In his next collection, Parts of a World, his writing frequently adopts a solipsistic perspective in exemplifying and explicating his definition of poetry. Such poems as “Prelude to Objects,” “Add This to Rhetoric,” and “Of Modern Poetry” all address, to some extent, the self-referential nature of poetry. In “Of Modern Poetry” Stevens defined the genre as “the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.” In Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston wrote that in “Of Modern Poetry,” as with many poems in Parts of a World, “Stevens cannot say what the mind wants to hear; he must be content to write about a poetry that would express what the mind wants to hear, and to render the satisfaction that might ensue.”

Stevens followed Parts of a World with Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, which is usually considered his greatest poem on the nature of poetry. This long poem, more an exploration of a definition than it is an actual definition, exemplifies the tenets of supreme fiction even as it articulates them. The poem is comprised of a prologue, three substantial sections, and a coda. The first main section, entitled “It Must Be Abstract,” recalls Harmonium’s themes by hailing art as the new deity in a theologically deficient age. Abstraction is necessary, Stevens declares, because it fosters the sense of mystery necessary to provoke interest and worship from humanity. The second long portion, “It Must Change,” recalls “Sunday Morning” in citing change as that which ever renews and sustains life: “Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace / And for the particulars of rapture come.” And in “It Must Give Pleasure,” Stevens expresses his conviction that poetry must always be “a thing final in itself and, therefore, good: / One of the vast repetitions final in themselves and, therefore, good, the going round / And round and round, the merely going round, / Until merely going round is a final good, / The way wine comes at a table in a wood.” Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction concludes with verses describing the poet’s pursuit of supreme fiction as “a war that never ends.” Stevens, directing these verses to an imaginary warrior, wrote: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night. It is / For that the poet is always in the sun, / Patches the moon together in his room / to his Virgilian cadences, up down, / Up down. It is a war that never ends.” This is perhaps Stevens’s most impressive description of his own sense of self, and in it he provides his most succinct appraisal of the poet’s duty.
Although Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction elucidates Stevens’s notions of poetry and poet, it was not intended by him to serve as a definitive testament. Rather, he considered the poem as a collection of ideas about the idea of supreme fiction. Writing to Henry Church, to whom the poem is dedicated, Stevens warned that it was not a systematized philosophy but mere notes— “the nucleus of the matter is contained in the title.” He also reaffirmed his contention that poetry was the supreme fiction, explaining that poetry was supreme because “the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction was published as a small volume in 1942 and was subsequently included in the 1947 collection, Transport to Summer. Also featured in the collection is Esthetique du Mal, another long poem first published separately. In this poem Stevens explored the poetic imagination’s response to specific provocations: pain and evil. Seconding philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Stevens asserted that evil was a necessary aspect of life, and he further declared that it was both inspirational and profitable to the imagination. This notion is most clearly articulated in the poem’s eighth section, which begins: “The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena.” In a later stanza, one in which Bloom found the poem’s “central polemic,” Stevens emphasizes the positive aspect of evil: “The tragedy, however, may have begun, / Again, in the imagination’s new beginning, / In the yes of the realist spoken because he must / Say yes, spoken because under every no / Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.” In Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Bloom called Esthetique du Mal Stevens’s “major humanistic polemic” of the mid-1940s.
In 1950 Stevens published his last new poetry collection, The Auroras of Autumn. The poems in this volume show Stevens further refining and ordering his ideas about the imagination and poetry. Among the most prominent works in this volume is “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” which constitutes still another set of notes toward a supreme fiction. Here Stevens finds the sublime in the seemingly mundane by recording his contemplations of a given evening. The style here is spare and abstract, resulting in a poem that revels in ambiguity and the elusiveness of definitions: “It is not the premise that reality / Is solid. It may be a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade.” In this poem Stevens once again explicates as the supreme synthesis of perception and the imagination and produces a poem about poetry: “This endlessly elaborating poem / Displays the theory of poetry, / As the life of poetry.” Other poems in The Auroras of Autumn are equally self-reflexive, but they are ultimately less ambitious and less provocative, concerned more with rendering the mundane through abstraction and thus prompting a sense of mystery and, simultaneously, order. As fellow poet Louise Bogan noted in a New Yorker review of the collection, only Stevens “can describe the simplicities of the natural world with more direct skill,” though she added that his “is a natural world strangely empty of human beings.”
Stevens followed The Auroras of Autumn with a prose volume about his poetics, The Necessary Angel. In the essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” he addressed the imagination’s response to adversity, and in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” he once again championed the imagination as the medium toward a reality transcending mere action and rationalization. Consistent in the volume is Stevens’s willingness to render his ideas in a precise, accessible manner. Thus The Necessary Angel considerably illuminates his poetry.
By the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America’s greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers. Despite this widespread recognition, Stevens kept his position at the Hartford company, perhaps fearing that he would become isolated if he left his lucrative post. In his later years with the firm, Stevens amassed many writing awards, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the 1951 National Book Award for The Auroras of Autumn, and several honorary doctorates. His greatest accolades, however, came with the 1955 publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and another National Book Award. In this volume Stevens gathered nearly all of his previously published verse, save Owl’s Clover, and added another 25 poems under the title “The Rock.” Included in this section are some of Stevens’s finest and most characteristically abstract poems. Appropriately, the final poem in “The Rock” is entitled “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself,” in which reality and the imagination are depicted as fusing at the instant of perception: “That scrawny cry—it was / A chorister whose c preceded the choir. / It was part of the colossal sun, / Surrounded by its choral rings, / Still far away. It was like / A new knowledge of reality.”
After publishing his collected verse Stevens suffered increasingly from cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized. He died in August 1955. In the years since his death Stevens’s reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academicians and has consequently generated extensive criticism. Among the most respected interpreters of Stevens’s work are Helen Vendler, who has demonstrated particular expertise on the longer poems, and Harold Bloom, whose Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate is probably the most provocative and substantial, if also dense and verbose, of the many volumes attending to Stevens’s entire canon. For Bloom, Stevens is “a vital part of the American mythology.”

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Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

Stevens' first period of writing begins with his 1923 publication of the Harmonium collection, followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred in the eleven years immediately preceding the publication of his Transport to Summer, when Stevens had written three volumes of poems including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, along with Transport to Summer. His third and final period of writing poems occurred with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn in the early 1950s followed by the release of his Collected Poems in 1954 a year before his death.

His best-known poems include The Auroras of Autumn, 'Anecdote of the Jar', 'Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock', 'The Emperor of Ice-Cream', 'The Idea of Order at Key West', 'Sunday Morning', 'The Snow Man', and 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'.

• 1Life and career
• 2Reception
• 3Interpretation
• 7Bibliography

Life and career[edit]

Birth and early life[edit]

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 into a Lutheran family in the line of John Zeller, his maternal great-grandfather, who had settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee.^[1]

Education and marriage[edit]

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree three-year special student from 1897 to 1900. According to his biographer Milton Bates, Stevens was introduced personally to the philosopher George Santayana living in Boston at the time and was strongly influenced by Santayana's book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900).^[2] Holly Stevens, his daughter, recalled her father's long dedication to Santayana when she posthumously reprinted her father's collected letters in 1977 for Knopf.^[3] In one of his early journals, Stevens gave an account of spending an evening with Santayana in early 1900 and sympathizing with Santayana regarding a poor review which was published at that time concerning Santayana's Interpretations book.^[4] After his Harvard years, Stevens moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating with a law degree in 1903 following the example of his two other brothers with law degrees.

On a trip back to Reading in 1904, Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886–1963, also known as Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer.^[5] After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her poorly educated and lower-class. As The New York Times reported in an article in 2009, 'Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime.' ^[6] A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She was baptized Episcopalian and later posthumously edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.^[3]

In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916–1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years, Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the couple remained married.^[6] In his biography of Stevens, Paul Mariani relates that the couple was largely estranged, separated by nearly a full decade in age, though living in the same home by the mid-1930s stating, '...there were signs of domestic fracture to consider. From the beginning Stevens, who had not shared a bedroom with his wife for years now, moved into the master bedroom with its attached study on the second floor.'^[7] Helen Vendler in her study of Stevens indicated that his marriage to a woman with a ninth-grade education was not without concern for Stevens who was also physically almost twice the size of his diminutive wife, who was nearly a full foot shorter in height than her husband and weighed over 100 pounds less than the large framed Stevens.^[8]

Career[edit]

After working in several New York law firms between 1904 and 1907, he was hired in January, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company.^[9] By 1914 he had become vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri.^[10] When this job was made redundant after a merger in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company^[11] and moved to Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.

His career as a businessman-lawyer by day and a poet during his leisure time has received significant attention as summarized in the Thomas Grey book dealing with his insurance executive career. Grey has summarized parts of the responsibilities of Stevens' day-to-day life which involved the evaluation of surety insurance claims by stating: 'If Stevens rejected a claim and the company was sued, he would hire a local lawyer to defend the case in the place where it would be tried. Stevens would instruct the outside lawyer through a letter reviewing the facts of the case and setting out the company's substantive legal position; he would then step out of the case, delegating all decisions on procedure and litigation strategy.'^[12]

In 1917 Stevens and his wife moved to 210 Farmington Avenue where they remained for the next seven years and where he completed his first book of poems, Harmonium.^[13] From 1924 to 1932 he resided at 735 Farmington Avenue.^[14] In 1932 he purchased a 1920s Colonial at 118 Westerly Terrace where he resided for the remainder of his life.^[14] According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive earning by the mid-1930s '$20,000 a year, equivalent to about $350,000 today (2016). And this at a time (during The Great Depression) when many Americans were out of work, searching through trash cans for food.'^[15]

By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company.^[16] After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford.^[17] Throughout his life, Stevens was politically conservative^[18][19] and was described by the critic William York Tindall as a Republican in the mold of Robert A. Taft.^[20]

Travel[edit]

Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, between 1922 and 1940, usually staying at the Casa Marina hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He first visited in January 1922, while on a business trip. 'The place is a paradise,' he wrote to Elsie, 'midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen.'^[21] The influence of Key West upon Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order.^[22] In February 1935, Stevens encountered the poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The two men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens had been drunk and acted inappropriately.^[23] According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Stevens often visited speakeasy establishments during the prohibition with both lawyer friends and poetry acquaintances.^[24]

The following year, Stevens was in an altercation with Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West.^[25] Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized.^[26]Paul Mariani, a biographer of Stevens, relates this as,

... directly in front of Stevens was the very nemesis of his Imagination-- the antipoet poet (Hemingway), the poet of extraordinary reality, as Stevens would later call him, which put him in the same category as that other antipoet, William Carlos Williams, except that Hemingway was fifteen years younger and much faster than Williams, and far less friendly. So it began, with Stevens swinging at the bespectacled Hemingway, who seemed to weave like a shark, and Papa hitting him one-two and Stevens going down 'spectacularly,' as Hemingway would remember it, into a puddle of fresh rainwater.^[27]

In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued.^[28] As related by Paul Mariani in his biography of Stevens the exchange in Key West in February 1940 included the following comments:

Stevens: Your poems are too academic.

Frost: Your poems are too executive.

Stevens: The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects.

Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.^[29]

Post-war poetry[edit]

By late February 1947 with Stevens approaching 67 years of age, it became apparent that Stevens had completed the most productive ten years of his life in writing poetry. February 1947 saw the publication of his volume of poems titled Transport to Summer, which was positively received by F. O. Mathiessen writing for The New York Times. In the eleven years immediately preceding its publication, Stevens had written three volumes of poems including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, along with Transport to Summer. These were all written before Stevens would take up the writing of his well-received poem titled The Auroras of Autumn.^[30]

In 1950–1951 when Stevens received news that Santayana had retired to live at a retirement institution in Rome for his final years, Stevens composed his poem 'To an Old Philosopher in Rome' in memory of his mentor while a student at Harvard: 'It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,/ With every visible thing enlarged and yet/ No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, / The immensest theatre, the pillowed porch,/ The book and candle in your ambered room.'

Last illness and death[edit]

As reported by his biographer Paul Mariani, Stevens maintained a large, corpulent figure throughout most of his life, standing at 6 feet 2 inches and weighing as much as 240 pounds, which required some treating doctors to put him on medical diets during his lifetime.^[31] On March 28, 1955 Stevens went to see Dr. James Moher for accumulating detriments to his health.^[32] Dr. Moher's examination did not reveal anything and ordered Stevens to undergo an x-ray and barium enema on April 1, neither of which showed anything.^[32] On April 19 Stevens underwent a G.I. series that revealed diverticulitis, a gallstone, and a severely bloated stomach. Stevens was admitted to St. Francis Hospital and on April 26 he was operated on by Dr. Benedict Landry.^[32]

It was determined that Stevens was suffering from stomach cancer in the lower region by the large intestines and blocking the normal digestion of food. Lower tract oncology of a malignant nature was almost always a mortal diagnosis in the 1950s, although this direct information was withheld from Stevens even though his daughter Holly was fully informed and advised not to tell her father. Stevens was released in a temporarily improved ambulatory condition on May 11 and returned to his home on Westerly Terrace to recuperate. His wife insisted on trying to attend to him as he recovered but she had suffered a stroke in the previous winter and she was not able to assist as she had hoped. Stevens entered the Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20.^[33]

By early June he was still sufficiently stable to attended a ceremony at the University of Hartford to received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree.^[33] On June 13 he traveled to New Haven to collect an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University.^[33] On June 20 he returned to his home at Westerly Terrace and insisted on working for limited hours.^[34] On July 21 Stevens was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital and his condition deteriorated.^[35] On August 1, though bedridden, he had revived sufficiently to speak some parting words to his daughter before falling asleep after normal visiting hours were over; he was found deceased the following morning on August 2, 1955 at eight-thirty in the morning.^[36] He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery. Stevens' lifetime parallels almost exactly that of Albert Einstein, who (like Stevens) was born in 1879 and died in 1955.^[37]

Paul Mariani in his biography of Stevens, indicates that friends of Stevens were aware that throughout his years and many visits to New York City that Stevens was in the habit of visiting St Patrick's Cathedral for meditative purposes while in New York. Stevens debated questions of theodicy with Fr. Arthur Hanley during his final weeks, and was eventually converted to Catholicism in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer.^[38][39] This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly, who was not present at the time of the conversion according to Fr. Hanley.^[40] The conversion has been confirmed by both Fr. Hanley and a witnessing nun present at the time of the conversion and communion.^[41][42] Stevens's obituary in the local newspaper was minimal at the request of the family as to the details of his death. The obituary for Stevens which appeared in Poetry magazine was assigned to William Carlos Williams who felt it suitable and justified to compare the poetry of his deceased friend to the writings of Dante in his Vita Nuova and to Milton in his Paradise Lost.^[43] At the end of his life, Stevens had left uncompleted his larger ambition to rewrite Dante's Divine Comedy for those who 'live in the world of Darwin and not the world of Plato.'^[44]

Reception[edit]

Early 20th century[edit]

The initial reception of the poetry of Stevens followed the publication of his first collection of poems published as Harmonium in the early 1920s. Comments on the poems were made by fellow poets and a small number of critics including William Carlos Williams and Hi Simons.^[43] Helen Vendler, in her book on Stevens' poetry, commented that much of the early reception of his poems was oriented to the symbolic reading of his poems often using simple substitution of metaphors and imagery for their asserted equivalents in meaning. For Vendler, this method of reception and interpretation was often limited in its usefulness and would eventually be replaced by more effective forms of literary evaluation and review.^[8]

Late 20th century[edit]

Following Stevens' death in 1955, the literary interpretation of his poetry and critical essays began to flourish with full-length books written about his poems by such prominent literary scholars as Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler's two books on Stevens' poetry distinguished his short poems and his long poems and suggested that these poems be considered under separate forms of literary interpretation and critique. Her studies of the longer poems are in her book titled On Extended Wings and lists Stevens' longer poems as including The Comedian as the Letter C, Sunday Morning, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, Like Decorations in the Nigger Cemetery, Owl's Clover, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Examination of the Hero in a Time of War, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Esthetique du Mal, Description without Place, Credences of Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, and his last long poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.^[8] Another full length study of Stevens' poetry in the late 20th century is titled The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens by Daniel Fuchs.

Early 21st century[edit]

Interest in the reading and reception of Stevens' poetry continues into the early 21st century with a full volume dedicated in the Library of America to the collected writings and poetry of Stevens. Charles Altieri in his book on the reading of Stevens as a poet of what Altieri calls 'philosophical poetry' presents his own reading of such philosophers as Hegel and Wittgenstein while presenting a speculative interpretation of Stevens under this interpretative approach.^[45]Simon Critchley in his 2016 book Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens indicates a refinement concerning the appreciation of the interaction of reality and poetry in the poems of Wallace Stevens stating: 'Steven's late poems stubbornly show how the mind cannot seize hold of the ultimate nature of reality that faces it. Reality retreats before the imagination that shapes and orders it. Poetry is therefore the experience of failure. As Stevens puts it in a famous late poem, the poet gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself.'^[46]

Interpretation[edit]

The reception of the poetry of Stevens and its interpretation has been widespread and of diverse orientation. Leonard and Wharton in their book The Fluent Mundo indicate at least four such schools of interpretation beginning with the prime advocates of Stevens found in the critics Harvey Pearce and Helen Regeuiro who supported the thesis 'that Stevens's later poetry denies the value of imagination for the sake of an unobstructed view of the 'things themselves'.^[47] The next school of interpretation which is identified by Leonard and Wharton is the Romantic school of interpretation led by Joseph Riddel, Harold Bloom, James Baird and Helen Vendler. A third school of Stevens interpretation is found who see Stevens as heavily dependent on 20th century Continental philosophy which includes J. Hillis Miller, Thomas J. Hines, and Richard Macksey. A fourth school sees Stevens as fully Husserlian or Heideggerian in approach and tone of writing and which is led by Hines, Macksey, Simon Critchley, Glauco Cambon, and Paul Bove.^[47] These four schools of interpretations offer occasional agreement and disagreement of perspective, for example, Critchley of the Heideggerian school reads the interpretation by Bloom of Stevens as being in the anti-realist school while seeing Stevens as not being in the anti-realist school of poetic interpretation.^[48]

Maturity of poetry[edit]

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached forty years of age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled 'Phases' in the November 1914 edition of Poetry)^[49] was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the 'best and most representative' American poet of the time,^[50] no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. His contemporary, Harriet Monroe, termed Stevens 'a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to Him'.^[51]Helen Vendler notes that there are three distinguishable moods present in Stevens' long poems: ecstasy, apathy, and reluctance between ecstasy and apathy.^[8] She also notes that his poetry was highly influenced by the paintings of Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne:

Stevens saw in the paintings of both Paul Klee—who was his favorite painter—and Cézanne the kind of work he wanted to do himself as a Modernist poet. Klee had imagined symbols. Klee is not a directly realistic painter and is full of whimsical and fanciful and imaginative and humorous projections of reality in his paintings. The paintings are often enigmatic or full of riddles, and Stevens liked that as well. What Stevens liked in Cézanne was the reduction, you might say, of the world to a few monumental objects.^[52]

Stevens's first book of poetry, a volume titled Harmonium, was published in 1923, and republished in a second edition in 1930. Two more books of his poetry were produced during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn^[53][54] and in 1955 for Collected Poems.^[55][56]

Imagination and reality[edit]

For Thomas Grey, a Stevens biographer specializing in attention to Stevens as a businessman lawyer, Stevens in part related his poetry to his imaginative capacities as a poet while assigning his lawyer's duties more to the reality of making ends meet in his personal life. Grey finds the poem 'A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts' as useful to understanding the approach which Stevens took in his life separating between his poetry and his profession stating: 'The law and its prose were separate from poetry, and supplied a form of relief for Stevens by way of contrast with poetry, as the milkman (portrayed as the realist in the poem) relieves from the moonlight, as the walk around the block relieves the writer's trance like absorption. But the priority was clear: imagination, poetry, and secrecy, pursued after hours were primary, good in themselves; reason, prose, and clarity, indulged in during working hours, were secondary and instrumental'.^[57]

In writing for the Southern Review, Hi Simons typified much of the early Stevens as being a juvenile romantic subjectivist before becoming a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years.^[58] Stevens, whose work became meditative and philosophical, became very much a poet of ideas.^[50] 'The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,'^[59] he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work 'imagination' is not equivalent to consciousness nor is 'reality' equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in 'The Idea of Order at Key West',

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.^[60]

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, 'After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.'^[61] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: 'The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible.'^[62] As Stevens says in his essay 'Imagination as Value', 'The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.'^[63]

Supreme fiction[edit]

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is a lyrical poetic work of three parts, containing 10 poems each, with a preface and epilogue opening and closing the entire work of three parts. It was first published in 1942 and represents a comprehensive attempt by Stevens to state his view of the art of writing poetry. Stevens studied the art of poetic expression in many of his writings and poems including The Necessary Angel where he stated, 'The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.'^[64]

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a 'Supreme Fiction', an idea that would serve to correct and improve old notions of religion along with old notions of the idea of God of which Stevens was critical.^[65] In this example from the satirical 'A High-Toned Old Christian Woman', Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:

Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.^[66]

The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens's poetry: 'A great many of Stevens' poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement.'^[67] In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.

I am the angel of reality,
seen for a moment standing in the door.
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash;
A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?^[68]

In one of his last poems taken from his 1955 Collected Poems, 'Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour', Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination and he states this as being: 'The world imagined is the ultimate good.' Stevens places this thought in the individual human mind and writes of its compatibility with his own poetic interpretation of 'God' stating: 'Within its vital boundary, in the mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one.../ How high that highest candle lights the dark.'^[69]

Poetic criticism of old religion[edit]

Imaginative knowledge of the type described in 'Final Soliloquy' necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.^[69]

Stevens concludes that God and human imagination are closely identified, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with that old religious idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that the old religious idea of God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in old religious ideas. '[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life ... Powerful force though the mind is ... it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world ...; everything about him is part of the truth.'^[70]

... Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place^[71]

In this way, Stevens's poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. 'The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end.'^[72] The 'first idea' is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality—a reality that must always be qualified—and as such, always misses the mark to some degree—always contains elements of unreality.

Miller summarizes Stevens's position:

Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal....^[73]

Influence of Nietzsche[edit]

Aspects of Stevens's thought and poetry draw from the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Stevens' poem 'Description without Place,' for example, directly mentions the philosopher:

Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time.^[74]

Scholars have attempted to trace some of Nietzsche's influence on Stevens' thought in general. While Steven's intellectual relationship to Nietzsche's is complex, it is clear that Stevens shared the philosopher's perspective on topics such as religion, change, and the individual. Milton J. Bates notes that

...in a 1948 letter to Rodriguez Feo, [Stevens] expressed his autumnal mood with an allusion to Nietzsche: 'How this oozing away hurts notwithstanding the pumpkins and the glaciale of frost and the onslaught of books and pictures and music and people. It is finished, Zarathustra says; and one goes to the Canoe Club and has a couple of Martinis and a pork chop and looks down the spaces of the river and participates in the disintegration, the decomposition, the rapt finale' (L 621). Whatever Nietzsche would have thought of the Canoe Club and its cuisine, he would have appreciated the rest of the letter, which excoriates a world in which the weak affect to be strong and the strong keep silence, in which group living has all but eliminated men of character.^[75]

Literary influence[edit]

From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, 'There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.'^[76] The Poetry Foundation states that 'by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers.'^[77] Some critics, like Randall Jarrell and Yvor Winters, praised Stevens' early work but were critical of his more abstract and philosophical later poems.^[78][79]

Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the canon as one of the key figures of 20th-century American Modernist poetry.^[52] Bloom has called Stevens 'a vital part of the American mythology' and unlike Winters and Jarrell, Bloom has cited Stevens's later poems, like 'Poems of our Climate,' as being among Stevens's best poems.^[77]

In commenting on the place of Stevens among contemporary poets and previous poets, his biographer Paul Mariani stated, 'Stevens's real circle of philosopher-poets included Pound and Eliot as well as Milton and the great romantics. By extension, E. E. Cummings was a mere shadow of a poet, while Blackmur (a contemporary critic and publisher) did not even deign to mention Williams, Moore, or Hart Crane.'^[80]

In popular culture[edit]

In 1976, at Atelier Crommelynck, David Hockney produced a portfolio of twenty etchings called The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso.^[81] The etchings refer to themes of a poem by Stevens, The Man with the Blue Guitar. Petersburg Press published the portfolio in October 1977. In the same year Petersburg also published a book in which the poem's text accompanied the images.^[82]

Both titles of an early story by John Crowley, first published in 1978 as 'Where Spirits Gat Them Home', later collected in 1993 as 'Her Bounty to the Dead', come from 'Sunday Morning'.n The titles of two novels by D. E. Tingle, Imperishable Bliss (2009) and A Chant of Paradise (2014), come from 'Sunday Morning'. John Irving quotes Stevens's poem 'The Plot Against the Giant' in his novel The Hotel New Hampshire. In Terrence Malick's film Badlands, the nicknames of the protagonists are Red and Kit, a possible reference to Stevens's poem, 'Red Loves Kit'.

Nick Cave cited the lines 'And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving' in his song 'We Call Upon the Author'. They come from Stevens's poem 'Dry Loaf'. Later Vic Chesnutt recorded a song named 'Wallace Stevens' on his album North Star Deserter. The song references Stevens's poem 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'.

See also[edit]

'The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws'

Awards[edit]

During his lifetime, Stevens received numerous awards in recognition of his work, including:

• Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1949)^[83]
• National Book Award for Poetry (1951,^[84] 1955^[85]) for The Auroras of Autumn, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
• Frost Medal (1951)^[86]
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1955) for Collected Poems^[87]

Bibliography[edit]

Plays[edit]

• Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise (1916)

References[edit]

1. ^Adelaide Kirby Morris. Wallace Stevens Imagination and Faith. Princeton University Press. 1974. Page 12.
2. ^Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens. 'Stevens and the Supreme Fiction', by Milton Bates, p. 49.
3. ^ ^abRichardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923–1955, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988, p. 22.
4. ^George Santayana. Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Introduction by Joel Porte, MIT Press, page xxix.
5. ^The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie Kachel', edited by J. Donald Blount (The University of South Carolina Press, 2006)
6. ^ ^abVendler, Helen (August 23, 2009). 'The Plain Sense of Things'. The New York Times.
7. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Page 174.
8. ^ ^abcdVendler, Helen. On Extended Wings, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. 13.
9. ^Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879–1923, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986, p. 276.
10. ^Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 424.
11. ^Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 445
12. ^Thomas Grey. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press. 1991. Page 17.
13. ^[1]
14. ^ ^ab[2]
15. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Page 182.
16. ^Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 87.
17. ^Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 423.
18. ^Gioia, Dana; Kennedy, X.J. (2005). 'Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama: Wallace Stevens: Biography'. Longman. Archived from the original on July 24, 2011. Retrieved February 14, 2010.
19. ^Leonard, John (July 27, 1970). 'Books of The Times'. The New York Times.,
20. ^Moore, Harry T. (1963). Preface to Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments. Southern Illinois University Press. p. xi.
21. ^Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens
22. ^The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: 'O Florida, Venereal Soil,' 'The Idea of Order at Key West,' 'Farewell to Florida'
23. ^The Trouble with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, an April 14, 2009 article from the website of the Key West Literary Seminar
24. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016.
25. ^Hemingway Knocked Wallace Stevens into a Puddle and Bragged About It, a March 20, 2008 article from the website of the Key West Literary Seminar
26. ^Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker
27. ^Paul Mariani. Biography of Wallace Stevens. Page 207.
28. ^Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini
29. ^Paul Mariani. Biography of Wallace Stevens. Caption to illustration #17, after page 212.
30. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Page 312.
31. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Pages 152–181.
32. ^ ^abcPeter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 289.
33. ^ ^abcPeter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 290.
34. ^Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 291.
35. ^Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 293.
36. ^Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 296.
37. ^https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/einstein/biographical/
38. ^Letter from Father Arthur Hanley to Professor Janet McCann, July 24, 1977
39. ^Maria J. Cirurgião, 'Last Farewell and First Fruits: The Story of a Modern PoetArchived January 21, 2011, at the Wayback Machine.' Lay Witness (June 2000).
40. ^Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, New York, Random House, 1983, p. 295
41. ^Letter from James Wm. Chichetto to Helen Vendler, September 2, 2009, cited in a footnote to 'Deathbed conversion'.
42. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Pages 398–408.
43. ^ ^abMariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Page 405.
44. ^Thomas Grey. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press. 1991. Page 86.
45. ^Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013.
46. ^Simon Critchley (2016). Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Routledge Press.
47. ^ ^abLeonard and Wharton. The Fluent Mundo. The University of Georgia Press. p. ix–x.
48. ^Critchley, pp28-29.
49. ^Wallace Stevens (search results), Poetry MagazineArchived February 3, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.
50. ^ ^ab'Old New Haven', Juliet Lapidos, The Advocate, March 17, 2005
51. ^Review of 'Others Again 'ed. by Alfred Kreymborg in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 1915
52. ^ ^ab'Wallace Stevens.' Voice and Visions Video Series. New York Center for Visual History, 1988.[3]
53. ^Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 378.
54. ^'National Book Awards – 1951'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
    (With acceptance speech by Stevens and essay by Katie Peterson from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)
55. ^'National Book Awards – 1955'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-02.
    (With acceptance speech by Stevens and linked essay by Neil Baldwin from the Awards 50-year celebration series.)
56. ^Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 420.
57. ^Thomas Grey. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press. 1991. Page 46.
58. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Pages 239.
59. ^Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America, 1997 (Kermode, F., & Richardson, J., eds.), p. 306.
60. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 106.
61. ^Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous, London: Faber and Faber, 1990 (Milton J. Bates, ed.), p. 185.
62. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 41.
63. ^Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, Random House USA Paperbacks (Feb 1965) ISBN978-0-394-70278-0
64. ^Stevens, The Necessary Angel, supra., p. 6.
65. ^Brazeal, Gregory (Fall 2007). 'The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?'. Journal of Modern Literature. 31 (1): 80. doi:10.2979/jml.2007.31.1.80. SSRN1738590.
66. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 47.
67. ^Miller, J. Hillis. 'Wallace Stevens'. Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, p. 226. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.
68. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 423.
69. ^ ^abStevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 444.
70. ^Southworth, James G. Some Modern American Poets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. 92.
71. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 136-37.
72. ^Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 330-31.
73. ^Miller, supra., p. 221
74. ^Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, p. 342.
75. ^Milton J. Bates, 'Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self' (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 255.
76. ^'Wallace Stevens: Biography and Recollections by Acquaintances,' Modern American Poetry.
77. ^ ^ab'Wallace Stevens.' Poetry Foundation Article
78. ^Jarrell, Randall. 'Reflections on Wallace Stevens.' Poetry and the Age. 1953.
79. ^Winters, Yvor. 'Wallace Stevens or the Hedonist's Progress.' In Defense of Reason, 1943.
80. ^Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. Page 177.
81. ^Hockney, Davis (1976–1977). 'The Old Guitarist' From The Blue Guitar'. British Council; Visual Arts. Petersburg Press. Archived from the original on December 15, 2013. Retrieved June 20, 2012.
82. ^Hockney, David; Stevens, Wallace (January 1, 1977). The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso. Petersburg Ltd. ISBN978-0902825031. Retrieved June 20, 2012.
83. ^'The Bollingen Prize for Poetry'. Yale University. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
84. ^'National Book Awards – 1951'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
85. ^'National Book Awards – 1955'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
86. ^'Frost Medalists'. Poetry Society of America. Retrieved July 18, 2016.
87. ^Poetryhttp://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-category/224. Retrieved July 18, 2016.Missing or empty title= (help)
88. ^Excerpt: 'Selected Poems', a December 3, 2009 NPR article on Stevens

Further reading[edit]

• Baird, James. The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1968)
• Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985)
• Beckett, Lucy. Wallace Stevens (1974)
• Beehler, Michael. T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference (1987)
• Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (1972)
• Berger, Charles. Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1985)
• Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature (1988)
• Blessing, Richard Allen. Wallace Stevens' 'Whole Harmonium' (1970)
• Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1980)
• Bloom, Harold. Figures of Capable Imagination (1976)
• Borroff, Marie, ed. Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963)
• Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (1983)
• Brogan, Jacqueline V. The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics (2003)
• Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005)
• Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1987)
• Doggett, Frank. Stevens' Poetry of Thought (1966)
• Doggett, Frank. Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem (1980)
• Doggett, Frank (Ed.), Buttel, Robert (Ed.). Wallace Stevens: A Celebration (1980)
• Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens (1960)
• Galgano, Andrea. L'armonia segreta di Wallace Stevens, in Mosaico (2013)
• Grey, Thomas. The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of PoetryHarvard University Press (1991)
• Ehrenpreis, Irvin (Ed.). Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology (1973)
• Enck, John J. Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments (1964)
• Filreis, Alan. Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties & Literary Radicalism (1994)
• Hines, Thomas J.. The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels With Husserl and Heidegger (1976)
• Hockney, David. The Blue Guitar (1977)
• Kessler, Edward, 'Images of Wallace Stevens' (1972)
• Leggett, B.J. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (1992)
• Leonard, J.S. & Wharton, C.E. The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (1988)
• Litz, A. Walton. 'Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens' (1972)
• Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991)
• Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016.
• MacLeod, Glen. 'Wallace Stevens and Modern Art: From the Armory Show to Abstract Expressionism' (1993)
• McCann, Janet. Wallace Stevens Revisited: The Celestial Possible (1996)
• Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens (1974)
• Ragg, Edward. 'Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction' (2010)
• Tanaka, Hiroshi. 'A New Attempt of an American Poet: Wallace Stevens.' In Papers on British and American Literature and Culture: From Perspectives of Transpacific American Studies. Ed. Tatsushi Narita. Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan, 2007. 59–68.
• Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer PoemsHarvard University Press (1969)
• Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of DesireHarvard University Press (1986)
• Woodman, Leonora. Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition (1983)

External links[edit]

Wallace Stevens

• Works by Wallace Stevens at Open Library
• Poems and profile at PoetryFoundation.org
• Yale College Lecture on Wallace Stevens audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
• Profile at the Academy of American Poets
• Works by or about Wallace Stevens at Internet Archive
• Works by Wallace Stevens at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• The PennSound/Woodberry Poetry Room Wallace Stevens Audio Project from the University of Pennsylvania
• The Wallace Stevens Papers at the Online Archive of California

Wallace Stevens Summary