Wallace Stevens

Born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of a prosperous lawyer and schoolteacher, Wallace Stevens attended Harvard for three years, where he edited the Advocate and absorbed the aestheticism that would color all his work. He took a law degree from New York Law School in 1904, practiced briefly in New York, and in 1916 joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut, where he would rise to vice president and remain until his death. The double life became his signature: by day an insurance executive dealing in surety bonds, by night and on his famous two-mile walks to work , composing lines to the rhythm of his stride , he was among the most ambitious poets of the century. Harmonium (1923), his first book, sold fewer than a hundred copies but contained “Sunday Morning,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” poems that reimagined what English verse could do with sound, color, and philosophical argument. He published almost nothing for a decade, then reemerged with Ideas of Order (1935) and The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937). In Key West in 1936, drunk at a party, he took a swing at Ernest Hemingway and broke his own hand on the novelist’s jaw. Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and The Auroras of Autumn (1950) deepened his central inquiry: whether poetry could replace religion as a source of meaning. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize. Stevens died of stomach cancer on August 2, 1955, in Hartford, at seventy-five, having never held a teaching post or given a public reading in a university.