Poet and insurance executive, born in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. He took a special course at Harvard (18971900) and published some poems while there. He went to New York City to work as a journalist (19001), but did not care for journalism and went to New York University Law School (19013). He practised law in New York City (190416), and then joined the legal staff of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co (1916), became a vice-president (1934), and remained there until his death. While in New York City he had come to know many of the leading writers and artists, and he published his first poems as an adult in 1914, with Sunday Morning appearing in Poetry magazine in 1915. His verse play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise (1916) won a Poetry prize and was produced by New York's Provincetown Playhouse (1917). His first collection of poetry, Harmonium (1923), sold less than 100 copies but received some acclaim from fellow poets. More collections followed throughout the 1930s and 1940s, but not until the 1950s did he begin to receive wider recognition, reflected in literary awards, publication of his essays and addresses, and tributes to him as a major modern poet. After his death his influence on poets and serious readers of poetry only increased, for they found in the meticulous language and daring metaphors of such poems as The Emperor of Ice Cream and The Man with the Blue Guitar, decidedly difficult as they are, the creative imagination that allows humans to face the reality Stevens valued.
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a major American Modernist poet.
Life and career
Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania and attended, but did not complete a degree at, Harvard, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel;
After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company.
Stevens was baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from terminal cancer. After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens was readmitted and died on August 2, 1955 at the age of seventy-six.
Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication ("Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, 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. It was in this later period that Stevens began to be recognized as a major poet, and he received the National Book Award in 1951 and 1955.
Imagination and reality
Stevens is very much a poet of ideas. His main ideas revolve around 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. 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. Thus Stevens could write in The Idea of Order at Key West,
Oh!In his book, Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption”. 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."
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."
The jar is a striking example of an order that does not feel a part of the land, and so seems to violate the existing order, “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee”. When the imagination is available to reality and does not try to force itself, reality becomes like a bar of sand onto which the imagination naturally washes and recedes.
The imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment - a particular time, place and culture - and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in their normal lives between the influence the world has on our imagination and the influence that our imagination has on the way we view the world.
For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world.
Supreme fiction
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.
Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a “Supreme Fiction.” In this satirical example from "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying notions of reality:
Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: "A great many of Stevens’ poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement.” 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 which satisfies the imagination, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It 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 comforting order, “A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind.”
This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.
We say God and the imagination are one .Stevens concludes that god is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of god may be accessed again. Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place
In this way, Stevens’ 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 . 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.
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, / 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.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. 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. 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. "Wallace Stevens." Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955. New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988. Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1965. Stevens, Wallace. Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
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