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Wallace Stevens

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

File:Wallace Stevens sitting.jpg
Wallace Stevens

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. 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. A daughter, Holly, would be born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired in 1908 as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm. By 1914 he had become 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.

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 in 1955 at the age of seventy-six. He reportedly converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.Template:Fn

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. 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 seventieth year. His first major publication ("Sunday Morning") was written at the age of thirty-eight, although as an undergraduate at Harvard he had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life.

Poetry

Stevens' 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." 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.

Stevens was very much an atheist,Template:Fn and his poetry has a strong atheistic undercurrent, as in "The Man with the Blue Guitar": "Poetry // Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns."

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. 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.

Excerpts from Some Stevens Poems

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

"Sunday Morning"

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.

"The Idea of Order at Key West," found at[1]

A few of Stevens' best-known poems, including "Sunday Morning, "Anecdote of the Jar,""The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Peter Quince at the Clavier, "The Snow Man," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," are found at web-books.com.

Notes

  • Template:Fnb See the letter written by the priest who claimed to have baptized Stevens (reproduced at the website of Professor Alan Filreis). See also a relevant newspaper article on Milton Bates, a scholar of Stevens.
  • Template:Fnb At least in his writings. (See the previous footnote and accompanying text.) See, e.g., a 1940 letter to Hi Simons: "It is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion. . . . My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe." Collected Poetry and Prose, 966.

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

Works on Stevens


 
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