Wallace Stevens

1.1. Birth and Early Life

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 into a prosperous Lutheran family of Dutch and German descent. His maternal great-grandfather, John Zeller, had settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee, indicating a lineage rooted in immigration and the search for freedom.

1.2. Education and Marriage

As the son of a successful lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard University as a non-degree special student from 1897 to 1900, where he served as the 1901 president of The Harvard Advocate. During his time in Boston, he was personally introduced to the philosopher George Santayana and was deeply influenced by Santayana's book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. His daughter, Holly Stevens, later noted her father's enduring dedication to Santayana when she posthumously edited his collected letters. Stevens himself recorded an evening spent with Santayana in early 1900, expressing sympathy for a poor review of Interpretations at the time. After Harvard, Stevens briefly worked as a journalist in New York City before following his brothers' example and attending New York Law School, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1903.

In 1904, during a trip back to Reading, Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886-1963), who worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer. After a prolonged courtship, they married in 1909, despite strong objections from his parents, who considered Elsie to be poorly educated and of a lower social class. No members of Stevens's family attended the wedding, and he never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime. Their only 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 an apartment in New York City from sculptor Adolph Alexander Weinman. Weinman created a bust of Elsie, and her striking profile is believed to have been used as a model for Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years, Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness, which strained their marriage. Although they remained married, they were largely estranged and lived in separate bedrooms by the mid-1930s, according to biographer Paul Mariani.

1.3. Career in Insurance and Law

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company in January 1908. By 1914, he had become vice president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this position became redundant due to a merger in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and relocated to Hartford, Connecticut, where he resided for the remainder of his life.

Stevens's dual career as a businessman-lawyer by day and a poet during his leisure time has garnered significant attention. Thomas Grey, a Stevens biographer, noted that Stevens's daily responsibilities involved evaluating surety insurance claims. If a claim was rejected and the company was sued, Stevens would hire a local lawyer to defend the case, providing instructions through a letter outlining the facts and the company's legal position, then delegating procedural and litigation strategy decisions.

In 1917, Stevens and his wife moved to 210 Farmington Avenue in Hartford, where he completed his first book of poems, Harmonium. From 1924 to 1932, they lived at 735 Farmington Avenue. In 1932, he purchased a 1920s Colonial house at 118 Westerly Terrace, where he lived for the rest of his life. By the mid-1930s, Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive, earning 20.00 K USD annually, which was equivalent to approximately 350.00 K USD in 2016, a substantial income during The Great Depression. In Hartford, a public art project known as the "Wallace Stevens Walk" features 13 stone monuments inscribed with stanzas from his poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" along his daily walking route to work, commemorating his blend of professional and poetic life.

By 1934, Stevens had been named vice president of The Hartford. Despite his growing fame as a poet, his colleagues at the insurance company were largely unaware of his literary pursuits, as he maintained a strict separation between his work and his poetry. After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined, as it would have required him to leave his job at The Hartford. Throughout his life, Stevens maintained a politically conservative stance, described by critic William York Tindall as a Republican in the mold of Robert A. Taft.

1.4. Travel and Personal Interactions

Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, between 1922 and 1940, often staying at the Casa Marina hotel. He first visited in January 1922 on a business trip, describing the place as "a paradise" with intensely blue skies and seas. Key West significantly influenced his poetry, appearing in many poems from Harmonium and Ideas of Order.

In February 1935, Stevens encountered the poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The two poets argued, with Frost reporting that Stevens was drunk and acted inappropriately. According to Mariani, Stevens frequently visited speakeasies during Prohibition with both lawyer friends and poetry acquaintances. The following year, Stevens was involved in an altercation with Ernest Hemingway at a party in Key West. Stevens broke his hand, reportedly from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized for the incident. Mariani described the confrontation as Stevens, the "antipoet poet" of extraordinary reality, swinging at the bespectacled Hemingway, who "seemed to weave like a shark," resulting in Stevens falling "spectacularly" into a puddle of rainwater.

In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West, where he again argued with Frost. Mariani recounts an exchange from this 1940 encounter:
:Stevens: Your poems are too academic.
:Frost: Your poems are too executive.
:Stevens: The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects.
:Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

1.5. Illness and Death

Throughout most of his life, Stevens maintained a large, corpulent figure, standing 20 ft ^{(6 m)} tall and weighing as much as 529 lb ^{(240 kg)}, leading his doctors to recommend medical diets. On March 28, 1955, Stevens sought medical attention for his declining health. Initial examinations were inconclusive, but further tests revealed diverticulitis, a gallstone, and a severely bloated stomach. He was admitted to St. Francis Hospital on April 26 and underwent surgery. It was determined that Stevens was suffering from malignant stomach cancer in the lower region, obstructing normal digestion. This diagnosis was almost always fatal in the 1950s, a fact withheld from Stevens but fully disclosed to his daughter, Holly, who was advised not to tell her father.

Stevens was temporarily released on May 11 in an improved ambulatory condition to recuperate at home. His wife, Elsie, who had suffered a stroke the previous winter, attempted to care for him but was unable to provide the assistance she had hoped. Stevens then entered the Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20. By early June, he was stable enough 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 receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University. He returned home on June 20, insisting on working limited hours.

On July 21, Stevens was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital, and his condition deteriorated. On August 1, though bedridden, he briefly revived to speak some parting words to his daughter before falling asleep. He was found deceased the next morning, August 2, 1955, at 8:30 AM, at the age of 75. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Friends of Stevens noted that throughout his life, he frequently visited St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City for meditative purposes. During his final weeks, while suffering from stomach cancer at St. Francis Hospital, Stevens debated questions of theodicy with Father Arthur Hanley, the hospital chaplain. Hanley later claimed to have converted Stevens to Catholicism in April 1955. 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. However, the conversion has been confirmed by both Hanley and a nun who was present. Stevens also maintained a long correspondence with Catholic nun, literary critic, and poet M. Bernetta Quinn, whose work he admired. Stevens's obituary in the local newspaper was minimal at his family's request. The obituary for Stevens in Poetry magazine, written by William Carlos Williams, compared Stevens's poetry to Dante's Vita Nuova and Milton's Paradise Lost. At the end of his life, Stevens had left uncompleted his ambition to rewrite Dante's Divine Comedy for those who "live in the world of Darwin and not the world of Plato."

2.1. Early Poetry and Harmonium

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output largely began as he approached 40 years of age. His first major publication, four poems from a sequence titled "Phases," appeared in the November 1914 edition of Poetry when he was 35. Although he had written poetry as an undergraduate at Harvard and exchanged sonnets with Santayana, many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50.

His first major poetry collection, Harmonium, was published in 1923, when he was 44. A slightly revised and amended second edition was released in 1930. While the initial sales were modest, critics immediately recognized its significance. Harmonium features some of his most famous poems, including "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". Early critical reception often focused on symbolic readings of his poems, though later interpretations would evolve. His early style was noted for its concise yet often difficult metaphors and imaginative imagery. Stevens was known for being rigorous in his self-criticism before publishing, and his poetic language was praised for its rich vocabulary and effective use of words for their shape and tone, not merely for conveying meaning.

2.2. Major Poetry Collections and Works

Stevens's second period of poetic output began with Ideas of Order (1933), followed by The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), and Parts of a World (1942). His volume Transport to Summer (1947) was positively received by F. O. Mathiessen in The New York Times. His third and final period commenced with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1951. This was followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951). His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955, the year of his death.

2.3. Imagination and Reality

A central theme in Stevens's work is the intricate interplay between imagination and reality. For Stevens, "imagination" is not merely equivalent to consciousness, nor is "reality" simply the world as it exists externally. Instead, reality is a dynamic product of the imagination as it actively shapes and perceives the world. This process is continuous, as humans constantly seek imaginatively satisfying ways to understand their surroundings. Reality, therefore, is an activity rather than a static object. Humans approach reality with a fragmented understanding, piecing together elements of the world to create coherence. This act of constructing a worldview through imagination is not a dry philosophical exercise but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. As Stevens famously wrote in "The Idea of Order at Key West":
: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.
Stevens believed that humans live in the tension between the forms imposed upon them by the world and the ideas of order that their imagination projects onto it. He stated 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."

2.4. Supreme Fiction and Religious Thought

Stevens was deeply concerned with the question of how to understand the world in an era where traditional religious beliefs no longer sufficed. His proposed solution was the concept of a "Supreme Fiction"-an idea intended to correct and improve upon older notions of religion and the idea of God, which Stevens critiqued. He suggested that poetry itself could serve as this new essence, taking the place of lost religious belief as "life's redemption." However, he acknowledged the inherent problem: a direct, unmediated knowledge of reality is impossible.

In his satirical poem "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman", Stevens playfully explores the limitations of readily accessible, but ultimately unfulfilling, notions of reality:
: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. And palm for palm,
:Madame, we are where we began.
The "squiggling saxophones" reflect the theme of "universal fluctuation" that runs throughout Stevens's poetry, as noted by J. Hillis Miller: "A great many of Stevens's poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement." Ultimately, reality persists, but it is constantly shifting.

The supreme fiction is a conceptualization of reality that resonates deeply, momentarily capturing something actual and real. In "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," Stevens describes the experience of an idea that satisfies the imagination, concluding, "The world imagined is the ultimate good." He places this thought within the individual human mind, articulating its compatibility with his own poetic interpretation of God: "Within its vital boundary, in the mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one .../ How high that highest candle lights the dark."

Stevens concluded that while God and human imagination are closely identified, the feeling of rightness once associated with old religious ideas of God can be rediscovered. This supreme fiction would be equally central to human existence, but contemporary to modern lives, offering a solace that old religious ideas could no longer provide. He believed that through a complete engagement with reality, one could attain a spiritual self capable of resisting life's disintegrating forces. As he wrote, "Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns, / Ourselves in poetry must take their place."

This perspective suggests that Stevens's poems adopt attitudes that echo earlier spiritual longings lingering 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." The "first idea" is an essential truth, but because all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction is inherently transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality-a reality that must always be qualified and, as such, always contains elements of unreality.

For example, the Korean critical reception of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" often connects its meditative quality to Buddhist concepts of "Mu" (무_nothingness^Korean) and "Gong" (공_emptiness^Korean), suggesting that the poem evokes a state of contemplation similar to a Buddhist koan.

2.5. Influence of Nietzsche

Aspects of Stevens's thought and poetry are influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Stevens's poem "Description without Place" directly references the philosopher:
:Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
:Of these discolorations, mastering
:The moving and the moving of their forms
:In the much-mottled motion of blank time.
Scholars have explored the complex intellectual relationship between Stevens and Nietzsche, noting shared perspectives on topics such as religion, change, and the individual. Milton J. Bates highlights Stevens's allusion to Nietzsche in a 1948 letter, where he expressed an "autumnal mood" with a quote from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: "'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'." Bates adds that Nietzsche would have appreciated the letter's critique of a world where the weak feign strength and the strong remain silent, and where group living diminishes individual character.

2.6. Poetic Style and Development

Stevens's poetic style is characterized by its late blooming, philosophical depth, and distinctive use of language. Harold Bloom called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of his time, noting that no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. His contemporary Harriet Monroe described Stevens as "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to him."

Helen Vendler identifies three distinct moods in Stevens's longer poems: ecstasy, apathy, and a reluctance oscillating between the two. She also notes that his poetry was significantly influenced by the paintings of Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne. Stevens admired in Klee's work the whimsical, fanciful, and imaginative projections of reality, often enigmatic and riddle-like, which he sought to emulate in his own Modernist poetry. From Cézanne, Stevens appreciated the reduction of the world to a few monumental objects, a quality he aimed to achieve in his verse. Stevens himself famously wrote, "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully," reflecting his belief in the profound and often challenging nature of poetic engagement.

3.1. Critical Reception

The initial reception of Stevens's poetry began with the publication of Harmonium in the early 1920s, drawing comments from fellow poets like William Carlos Williams and critics such as Hi Simons. Helen Vendler notes that much of the early interpretation of his poems relied on symbolic readings, often using simple substitutions of metaphors and imagery for their asserted meanings. Vendler believed this method was limited and would eventually be superseded by more effective forms of literary analysis.

After Stevens's death in 1955, the literary interpretation of his poetry and essays flourished, with full-length studies by prominent scholars like Vendler and Harold Bloom. Vendler's two books on Stevens's poetry differentiated his short and long poems, suggesting they required distinct approaches to interpretation. Her work On Extended Wings specifically focused on his longer poems, including "The Comedian as the Letter C", "Sunday Morning", "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery", "Owl's Clover", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War", "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", "Esthetique du Mal", "Description without Place", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", and his final, longest poem, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven". Another significant late 20th-century study was Daniel Fuchs's The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens.

Interest in Stevens's poetry continued into the early 21st century, with a dedicated volume in the Library of America compiling his collected writings. Charles Altieri, in his book on Stevens as a "philosophical poet," offers an interpretation informed by philosophers such as Hegel and Wittgenstein. Simon Critchley's 2016 book, Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, refines the appreciation of the interaction between reality and poetry in Stevens's work. Critchley argues that Stevens's late poems show how the mind cannot grasp the ultimate nature of reality, which recedes before the imagination that shapes it. Thus, poetry becomes an experience of failure, as Stevens indicates: "the poet gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself."

Leonard and Wharton, in their book The Fluent Mundo, identify at least four schools of interpretation for Stevens's poetry:

• The first, advocated by Harvey Pearce and Helen Regeuiro, posits that Stevens's later poetry denies the value of imagination in favor of an unobstructed view of "the things themselves."
• The second, the Romantic school, is led by Vendler, Bloom, James Baird, and Joseph Riddel.
• A third school, including J. Hillis Miller, Thomas J. Hines, and Richard Macksey, views Stevens as heavily dependent on 20th-century Continental philosophy.
• A fourth school, led by Hines, Macksey, Simon Critchley, Glauco Cambon, and Paul Bove, sees Stevens as fully Husserlian or Heideggerian in his approach.

These schools sometimes agree and sometimes disagree; for instance, Critchley reads Bloom's interpretation as anti-realist, while Critchley himself does not consider Stevens to be an anti-realist poet.

3.2. Literary Influence

From the outset, Stevens received praise from critics and fellow poets. Hart Crane wrote in 1919, after reading poems that would form Harmonium, that Stevens's work made "most of the rest of us quail." The Poetry Foundation states that by the early 1950s, Stevens was recognized as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, whose precise abstractions significantly influenced other writers. While some critics, such as Randall Jarrell and Yvor Winters, lauded his early work, they were critical of his more abstract and philosophical later poems.

Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have solidified Stevens's position in the Western canon as a pivotal figure of 20th-century American Modernist poetry. Bloom notably called Stevens "a vital part of the American mythology" and considered his later poems, such as "Poems of our Climate," among his best, contrary to the views of Winters and Jarrell. Paul Mariani, Stevens's biographer, placed him in a circle of "philosopher-poets" that included Pound, Eliot, Milton, and the great Romantics, suggesting a high regard for his intellectual and poetic stature.