Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet.

1 Life and Career
2 Poetry
3 Bibliography
4 External links

Life and Career

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and attended Harvard, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. By 1908 he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm, and by 1914 he was the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company. On a trip back to Reading in 1904, Stevens met Elsie Kachel Moll, whom he married, after a long courtship, in 1909. The marriage reputedly turned cold and distant, but the Stevenses never divorced. Their daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters.

If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named Vice President of his company. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church. Stevens died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955.

Interestingly, Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. Most of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. "The Auroras of Autumn," arguably his finest book of poems, was not published until after his 70th year. His first major publication ("Sunday Morning") was written at the age of 38, although as an undergraduate at Harvard he wrote poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life.

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Poetry

Stevens' his first book of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced only two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s but three more in the 1940s. Some have argued that his best poetry was written after he turned 60. It was in this later period that Stevens began to be recognized as a major poet, and he received the National Book Award in 1950 and 1954.

Stevens' subjects are the interplay between imagination and reality, and the relation between consciousness and the world. In Stevens, "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness, or "reality" to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Or rather — as the title of one of his late poems puts it — Stevens sees reality "as the activity of the most august imagination." This could mean reality is the product of god's (the most august one) imagination, or reality is an activity, not a static object, because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world. Stevens sees the poet (who, as for Wordsworth, is qualitatively the same as other people) as continually creating and discarding cognitive depictions of the world. These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, "It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self." His most general and impressive statement in this vein comes in a poem called "Men Made out of Words," in which he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life.".

Stevens considered the world and our perception of the world to be separate. 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. For Stevens, the imagination is not a flight of fancy, but rather the interactive relationship with reality, as best a person may understand it. The intellectual currents of Stevens' day regarded the existence of God with skepticism. Stevens shares this view, and his poetry has a strong atheistic undercurrent, as in "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man".

Could you have said the bluejay suddenly

Would swoop to earth? It is a wheel, the rays

Around the sun. The wheel survives the myths.

The fire eye in the clouds survives the gods.

Another occasional theme in Stevens's poetry is that of the hero and his place within the larger framework of war. An example of a part of Stevens' imagination that will not survive his time and place is his derogatory attitude towards people of African descent.

From the first, critics and fellow poets recognized Stevens's genius. While in college, he exchanged sonnets with George Santayana. In the 1930s, the rationalist Yvor Winters criticized Stevens as a decadent hedonist but acknowledged his great talent. 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." Beginning in the 1940s, critics such as Randall Jarrell spoke of Stevens as one of the major living American poets, even if they did so (as Jarrell did) with certain reservations about Stevens’s work. Stevens’ work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom was among the critics who have ensured Stevens’ position in the canon as a great poet, and perhaps the greatest American poet of the 20th century. Other major critics, such as Helen Vendler and Frank Kermode, have added their voices and analysis to this verdict. Many poets—James Merrill and Donald Justice most explicitly—have acknowledged Stevens as a major influence on their work, and his impact may also be seen in John Ashbery, Mark Strand, John Hollander, and others.