Wallace Stevens was a major figure in American modernist poetry, best known for complex verse exploring the interplay of imagination and reality. Stevens was born on October 2, 1872, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His father was a lawyer, his mother a schoolteacher. Religion, a recurring theme of Stevens’s poetry, loomed large during his childhood: his mother read him Bible passages every night and he attended parochial schools. The church music of his youth deeply affected him, and music proved an important motif throughout his later work. His father Garrett was a driving force behind Stevens’s educational and early professional advancement. In one letter, written to Stevens shortly after he had arrived at Harvard in 1897, Garrett reminded him that “work and study, study and work…are worth a decade of dreams.” But Garrett was also an avid reader, and he supplied his home with an expansive library and encouraged his son’s creative interests. At Harvard, Stevens immersed himself in the literary community, and by his junior year he had won all of the university’s major writing awards. He regularly contributed to The Harvard Advocate, eventually becoming its editor before relocating to rival publication The Harvard Monthly, where he was both editor and president. Stevens also developed a serious intellectual relationship with the philosopher George Santayana, one of his professors. The two engaged in vigorous discourse over matters of spirituality, and Santayana’s book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion exerted a strong influence over Stevens’s own ideas about art and the imagination.
Despite his success at Harvard, Stevens’s family could not afford to fund a fourth year of study. He left in 1900, moved to New York City, and began working at The New York Evening Post. He found journalism uninspiring but relished exploring New York, where he visited its many museums and art galleries and became a regular at the theater. Continuing the literary efforts of his student days, Stevens composed poetry and developed plays. He planned to emigrate to Paris to pursue his creative endeavors, but his father persuaded him to enter the New York School of Law instead. In 1908, the insurance firm American Bonding Company hired him, and the next year, with newfound financial stability, he married Elsie Viola Kachel. The newlyweds moved to the Chelsea neighborhood, and Stevens involved himself in New York’s modernist scene. He attended the salon of Walter Arensberg, a wealthy steel heir, where he met French painter Marcel Duchamp and developed long-term literary relationships with the poets William Carlos Williams and Marrianne Moore. Mingling amongst the Greenwich Village avant-garde, he also befriended E.E. Cummings and the lesser-known poet Donald Evans, whose sumptuous verse had a marked effect on Stevens’s own style.
He published his first non-collegiate poems in 1914, in Trend and then in Poetry Magazine. A year later came “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning,” his first significant works. In 1916, Stevens moved to Connecticut after accepting a position at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. Although Williams described this as the decision of “a frightened man drawing back,” Stevens’s creative output only intensified following his departure from New York. He published plays in 1916 and 1917, and in the next several years produced some of his most notable early poems—including the humorous “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle” and “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Both poems, along with “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Sunday Morning,” appeared in Stevens’s debut collection, Harmonium (1923). Featured alongside them were several of his most enduringly popular works, including “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”
Harmonium, published when Stevens was already 44 years old, introduced some of the creative preoccupations that would define the rest of his literary career: the problem of spirituality in the 20th century, and, in the realm of aesthetic philosophy, the imagination’s capacity to receive and transfigure reality. Poetry, wrote Stevens, is “the way of making one’s experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable.” Harmonium also established him as a unique stylist. His complex, often abstract blank verse is characterized by highly inventive and unexpected metaphorical imagery, obscure and unorthodox vocabulary, and precise attention to tone and rhythm. The collection earned praise from a few of Stevens’s contemporaries: Harriet Monroe reviewed it in Poetry, the magazine she founded and edited, lauding the work’s “philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are”; Marianne Moore called it “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic”; and the young Hart Crane wrote of Stevens as “a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.” Beyond this, however, Harmonium generated little critical attention, most of which was negative, and sold fewer than 100 copies.
In 1924, Elsie gave birth to a daughter, Holly, precipitating a several-year period of relative inactivity for Stevens (in a letter to Monroe, he described the experience of fatherhood as “a terrible blow to poor literature”). All the while, he maintained his position at the insurance firm, where he would work until his death. The dependable regularity of his profession helped mitigate a lifelong struggle with depression; he often lapsed into alcohol abuse when away from work. Among other artists, especially while drinking, Stevens was often blustering, arrogant, and self-important. At a 1935 party he insulted Robert Frost and denigrated his poetry, then offered a half-hearted apology by way of letter before disparaging him again a few years later. At another party, in 1936, Stevens drunkenly ridiculed Ernest Hemingway in his absence. Later in the evening, when the novelist arrived, Stevens took a swing at him—upon which Hemingway reportedly gave the poet, 15 years his senior, something of a thrashing.
At home, Stevens’s marriage collapsed after the birth of his daughter, although the couple stayed together, sleeping in separate rooms. Of his personality, the president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity once quipped that “unless they told me he had a heart attack, I never would have known he had a heart.” Stevens’s poems and letters are peppered with racist and anti-Semitic slurs and sentiments, and he supported Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini throughout the 1930s, long after many of his other American supporters had denounced him. On U.S. politics he remained conservative, if not somewhat disengaged. In the thirties, some critics reproached Stevens’s often abstract, self-referential, inward-looking poems for their apparent disregard for the state of the world—Europe in crisis, America in the throes of the Great Depression. But Stevens, who was making the modern equivalent of roughly $350,000 a year as an insurance executive, maintained a belief in his own reality: “Life is not people and scene,” he wrote, “but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself.” In 1949, however, Stevens described poetry as “my way of making the world palatable.” In the face of “a sense of imminent tragedy in the air today,” he felt, “&#8230;[poetry] is not necessarily a solution, but some defense against it.”
In 1935, Stevens published his second collection, Ideas of Order. Less lavish, less light-hearted than Harmonium, the volume distilled a concept central to the rest of Stevens’s work, that of the poet as the figure who can, in the words of scholar Frank Daggett, “give order to the world by his command of language.” Stevens’s annual, unaccompanied vacations to the Florida Keys (which he described as “a paradise”) provided inspiration for the collection, particularly its major poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West.”
Over the rest of the thirties, Stevens gained popularity and critical renown, publishing frequently in leading literary magazines. His volume The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) elaborated on the concept, introduced in Ideas of Order, of the poet as arbiter of reality. Stevens continued to refine his central themes with two long poems published as individual volumes: the first, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), acted as a treatise on poetry itself, exemplifying the increasingly self-referential work of Stevens’s later career. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction expounded, in his view, the necessary qualities of poetry—“It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” “It Must Give Pleasure”—while characterizing the poet’s quest as “a war that never ends.” Next came Esthétique du Mal (1945), asserting the Nietzschean argument that evil is a requisite element of life, and can in fact inspire beauty (“The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination”). The two long poems were combined in a collection titled Transport to Summer (1947); by this time, Stevens was nearing his critical and popular apotheosis. Critic F.O. Matthiessen, reviewing the volume for The New York Times, said it set forth “truths with the mellowness and tang of a late-summer wine.” The same year as its release, Stevens won Yale’s Bollingen Prize. In 1951, he published The Necessary Angel, an essay collection on poetry and an aid in interpreting his increasingly obscure work (he once said that “the poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully”). In The Necessary Angel, Stevens explicated his theories on poetry, reality, and imagination: “My final point, then, is that imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.”
In 1955, he released The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Stevens died that August, aged 75. Following his death, critical and scholarly interest in his work continued to mount, with the publication of monographs on his poetry from critics as notable as Helen Vendler, Frank Kermode, and Harold Bloom.
#OVO