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Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American Modernism poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.
Stevens's first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).
Many of Stevens's poems, like "Anecdote of the Jar", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry", and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", deal with the art of making art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.
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. The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie Kachel, edited by J. Donald Blount (The University of South Carolina Press, 2006) 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 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime." 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.
In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile may have been used on Weinman's 1916–1945 Mercury dime and 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. 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, Mariani writes: "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."Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016. p. 174.
Stevens's career as a businessman-lawyer by day and a poet during his leisure time has received significant attention, as summarized in Thomas Grey's The Wallace Stevens Case. Grey has summarized parts of the responsibilities of Stevens's day-to-day life that involved the evaluation of surety insurance claims as follows: "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."Thomas Grey. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press. 1991. p. 17.
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. From 1924 to 1932 he resided at 735 Farmington Avenue. In 1932 he purchased a 1920s Colonial at 118 Westerly Terrace, where he resided for the remainder of his life. According to Mariani, Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive by the mid-1930s, earning "$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."Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. p. 182. Harriet Monroe, reviewing Harmonium for Poetry, wrote: "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."
By 1934, Stevens had been named vice president of the company.Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 87. 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 job at The Hartford.Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 423.
Throughout his life, Stevens was politically conservative., The critic William York Tindall described him as a Republican in the mold of Robert A. Taft.
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. 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 Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker Mariani relates this:
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.Paul Mariani. The Whole Harmonium. p. 207.
In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued. Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini According to Mariani, the exchange in Key West in February 1940 included the following comments:
In 1950–51, 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":
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. This was withheld from Stevens, but 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 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 was not able to assist as she had hoped. Stevens entered the Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20.Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 290.
By early June he was still sufficiently stable to attend a ceremony at the University of Hartford to receive an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. On June 13 he traveled to New Haven to collect an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University. On June 20 he returned to his home and insisted on working for limited hours.Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 291. On July 21 Stevens was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital and his condition deteriorated.Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 293. On August 1, though bedridden, he revived sufficiently to speak some parting words to his daughter before falling asleep after normal visiting hours were over; he was found deceased the next morning, August 2, at 8:30.Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (New York: Random House, 1983), 296. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery.
Mariani indicates that friends of Stevens were aware that throughout his years and many visits to New York City, Stevens was in the habit of visiting St Patrick's Cathedral for meditative purposes. Stevens debated questions of theodicy during his final weeks with Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer and was eventually converted to Catholicism in April 1955 by Hanley. Letter from Father Arthur Hanley to Professor Janet McCann, July 24, 1977Maria J. Cirurgião, " Last Farewell and First Fruits: The Story of a Modern Poet ." Lay Witness (June 2000). This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly, who was not present at the time of the conversion, according to Hanley.Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, New York, Random House, 1983, p. 295 The conversion has been confirmed by both Hanley and a nun present at the time of the conversion and communion.Letter from James Wm. Chichetto to Helen Vendler, September 2, 2009, cited in a footnote to "Deathbed conversion".Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. pp. 398–408. He had a long correspondence with Catholic nun, literary critic and poet M. Bernetta Quinn, whose work he loved and with whom he was close. Stevens's obituary in the local newspaper was minimal at the family's request as to the details of his death. The obituary for Stevens that appeared in Poetry magazine was assigned to William Carlos Williams, who felt it suitable to compare Stevens's poetry to Dante's Vita Nuova and John Milton's Paradise Lost.Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. p. 405. 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 Charles Darwin and not the world of Plato."Thomas Grey. The Wallace Stevens Case. Harvard University Press. 1991. p. 86.
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."Wallace Stevens." Voice and Visions Video Series. New York Center for Visual History, 1988. [7]
Stevens's first book of poetry, 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 AutumnRichardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 378.
"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.) and in 1955 for Collected Poems.
"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.)Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 420.
In the Southern Review, Hi Simons wrote that much of early Stevens is juvenile romantic subjectivist, before he became a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years.Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. p. 239. Stevens, whose work became meditative and philosophical, became very much a poet of ideas. "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully",Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America, 1997 (Kermode, F., & Richardson, J., eds.), p. 306. he wrote. Of 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 wrote in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
In Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption."Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous, London: Faber and Faber, 1990 (Milton J. Bates, ed.), p. 185. 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."Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 41. 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."Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, Random House USA Paperbacks (Feb 1965)
Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that 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. 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:
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's poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement."Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens". Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, p. 226. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966. 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.
In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea that satisfies the imagination and writes, "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, writing: "Within its vital boundary, in the mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one .../ How high that highest candle lights the dark."Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 444.
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."Southworth, James G. Some Modern American Poets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. 92.
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."Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, pp. 330–31. 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 ...Miller, supra, p. 221
Scholars have attempted to trace some of Nietzsche's influence on Stevens's thought. While Stevens's intellectual relationship to Nietzsche's is complex, it is clear that he shared Nietzsche's perspective on topics such as religion, change, and the individual. Milton J. Bates writes:
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.Milton J. Bates, "Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 255.
Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the Western canon as one of the key figures of 20th-century American Modernist poetry. 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 among his best.
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."Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens – April 5, 2016. p. 177.
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". 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 1973 film Badlands, the nicknames of the protagonists are Red and Kit, a possible reference to Stevens's poem "Red Loves Kit".
Vic Chesnutt recorded a song named "Wallace Stevens" on his 2007 album North Star Deserter. The song references Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird".
Nick Cave cited the lines "And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving" in his song "We Call Upon the Author" (from the 2008 album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!). They come from Stevens' poem "Dry Loaf".
Stevens was honored with a US postage stamp in 2012. US Stamp Gallery: Wallace Stevens
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