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

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.

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.

Imagination and Reality

Stevens is very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” he wrote. His main ideas revolve around the interplay between imagination and reality

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.

Supreme Fiction

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was obsessed with the notion of a “Supreme Fiction,” a quasi-religious way of understanding the meaning of life which he often opposed to conventional religion, as in this example from “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”:

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.

His famous poem “Sunday Morning” imagines a woman attempting to come to terms with the permanence of death:

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?

The poem elegantly and elegiacally speaks of “the need of some imperishable bliss” but firmly asserts that “We live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island solitude, unsponsored, free.”

Yet Stevens’ poems also adopt attitudes that can be seen as deep spiritual longings. “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,” he writes in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” Even in ‘’Harmonium’’ he addresses the muse in religious terms:

Sister and mother of diviner love,

And of the sisterhood of the living dead

Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,

And of the fragrant mothers the most dear

And queen,



and of diviner love the day

And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread

Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown

Its venom of renown, and on your head

No crown is simpler than the simple air.

Stevens could even write in his later years, unironically, a poem called “God is Good. It Is a Beautiful Night.” In one of his last poems, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” what he calls “the intensest rendezvous” “is in that thought that we collect ourselves / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” This one thing is “a light, a power, the miraculous influence” wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a knowledge obscure, yet ordered and whole, “within its vital boundary, in the mind.”

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.

The Role of Poetry

Stevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general,” he says, “To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.” Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.” In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.

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." In a poem called "Men Made out of Words," he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life.” Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, / Not as it was.” Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one.

"On Modern Poetry"

Reputation and Influence

From the first, critics and fellow poets recognized Stevens's genius. In the 1930s, the critic 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.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Harmonium (1923)
• Ideas of Order (1936)
• Owl's Clover (1936)
• The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
• Parts of a World (1942)
• Transport to Summer (1947)
• Auroras of Autumn (1950)
• Collected Poems (1954)
• Opus Posthumous (1957)
• The Palm at the End of the Mind (1972)
• Collected Poetry and Prose (1997)

Prose

• The Necessary Angel (essays) (1951)
• Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (1966)

Works on Stevens

• Baird, James, The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1968)
• Bates, J. Milton, 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)
• 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)
• Doggett, Frank, Stevens' Poetry of Thought (1966)
• Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens (1960)
• Leggett, B.J., Early Stevens: The Nietzschean Intertext (1992)
• McCann, Janet, Wallace Stevens Revisited: The Celestial Possible 1996
• Richardson, Joan, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923 (1986)
• Richardson, Joan, Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955 (1988)
• Vendler, Helen, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems (1969)
• Vendler, Helen, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire (1986)

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