Stevens, Wallace
Born: October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania
Died: August 2, 1955, in Hartford, Connecticut
Vocations: Poet; Literary Critic; Fiction and Non-fiction Writer; Essayist
Geographic Connection to Pennsylvania: Reading, Berks County
Keywords: Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Hartford Insurance, Harvard University, Modernism, National Book Award, New York Law School, Pulitzer Prize
Abstract: One of the foremost Modernist poets, Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. He graduated from Harvard a year early in 1900, following this with a job at the New York Tribune. However, partly due to his ill fathers wishes, Stevens entered the New York Law School in 1901; graduating with a law degree four years later. Whilst he was practicing as an insurance lawyer, his literary career began in earnest, and by the mid-1920’s Stevens had written and published nearly 100 poems. By the end of his life, Stevens had garnered much peer and critical respect, his career ending by earning a Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1955. Stevens died of stomach cancer soon after this accomplishment.
Biography:
Of all the Modernist poets present in the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens led the most “normal” life. The second of five children, Stevens was born on October 2, 1879 to Garrett Barcalow Stevens and his wife Margaretha Catharine Zeller, known as Kate. Stevens was raised in the industrious, newly industrialized city of Reading, Pennsylvania. His father was a hard-working lawyer and business man, his mother a school teacher. According to Joan Richardson in her two volume biography, together they raised Stevens with values consistent with the Puritan ethic, “virtues of industry, sobriety, and thrift.” The age difference between Garret Jr. (eldest), Wallace, and John (youngest) had a large affect on Steven’s poetry. Being between his brothers in age gave Stevens the feeling of “moving up and down between two elements,” as argued by Richardson. This ‘moving up and down’ later set the tone and theme for much of his poetry, for example The Idea of Order at Key West. In this poem, the figure of the woman who “sang beyond the genius of the sea” is juxtaposed against the sea and the figure of Stevens observing how “it was she and not the sea we heard.” Thus the woman is in a form of limbo, because as “the song and water were not medleyed sound” the woman is unable to reconcile herself with the sea, and yet is also isolated from the humanity of Stevens because “As we beheld her striding there alone, / [We] Knew that there was never a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”
A talented student at Reading Boys High School, making the honor roll twice, Stevens graduated and enrolled at Harvard in 1897. Reflecting the ‘free’ choice of subject at Harvard was the strain between Stevens and his father; the former wishing to be a writer, the latter sending his son to Harvard “to make something” of himself. Set at this time on pursuing a “life of letters,” Stevens studied French, German, and English literature. Throughout his career at Harvard, Stevens was influenced by such philosopher-poets as George Santayana, William James, and Charles Eliot Norton. In particular, Santayana’s aesthetic philosophy was to have a considerable influence upon Stevens own poetic theory. Through the influence of these faculty members and peers such as Russell Loines, Stevens began to translate his feeling of being ‘between’ his brothers into a more general sense. Stevens expressed this as moving between “imagination” and “reality,” which eventually became the poet’s main theme. This artistic development can be viewed through his work for the Harvard Advocate, the undergraduate literary magazine of which Stevens became president in his final year of college. During these contented years, whilst Stevens was developing his writing talent at Harvard, his family circumstances began to change. In 1901, the year after Stevens left Harvard; Garret Sr. suffered a nervous breakdown due to the pressure of his practice and unsuccessful business ventures. After having enjoyed a particularly secure and affluent childhood, Stevens was now much more independent.
After leaving Harvard, Stevens chose to move to New York to pursue a literary vocation coupled with a reliable income. Armed with letters of introduction provided by the Harvard Old Boy’s association, Stevens made ventures into the world of journalism. His connections gained him introductions to newspapers such as the New York Post and the New York Tribune. Stevens chose the latter, and within a few months Richardson describes how New York became that “electric town which [he] adore[d].” However, Stevens clashed with his ill father in regards to his journalistic career. Straining against parental expectations and finding himself unfulfilled and anxious regarding his prospects, Stevens followed his father’s prudent advice and abandoned journalism for New York Law School in 1901, passing the bar four years later.
Following his graduation in 1904, Stevens began practicing his trade for several different law firms throughout New York. As well as his professional development, his emotional needs were satisfied when he began to court Elsie Viola Kachel, a simple country girl, who according to Richardson was “unthreateningly untutored in the ways of the world or of books.” Stevens and Kachel were married in Reading on September 21 1909, and consequently spent the next seven years living in New York. In 1916, Stevens took a job as an insurance lawyer at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would spend the rest of his professional life. Stevens’s new position involved a good deal of travel all over the United States, and it was on business that he made the first of several trips to Florida in 1916 (this state being a huge influence on such works as The Idea of Order at Key West and Sunday Morning). Stevens’ family life with Elsie was quiet, their family unit being complemented by the birth of a daughter, named Holly, in 1924. By 1934, Stevens was made Vice-President of the Hartford Company, a position which he held until his unfortunate demise from stomach cancer in 1955.
In direct contrast with his somewhat staid life as an insurance lawyer, Stevens was also writing a remarkable amount of poetry. Unlike his modernist contemporaries, according to the Pearson collection, Stevens wasn’t living “the bohemian life in Greenwich village” or “sipp[ing] wine in the cafés”, but his peers were still affected by his unmistakable literary talent.
Stevens began his national published career in 1914, when Pitts Sanborn (an acquaintance from Harvard) asked him to contribute to the ‘avant-garde’ magazine Trend. Stevens submitted a series of poems entitled Carnet de Voyage (trans. ‘travel notebook’). This tentative move into the wider public sphere, after years of private poetical creation, put Stevens back into contact with his colleagues from his time editing the Harvard Advocate, including Witter Bynner, Carl Van Vechten and Walter Arensburg. Stevens’ reunion with this literary group restored his desire to write poetry, and he followed his publication in Trend with many more in a range of modernist journals. During World War One, Stevens provided material for Aren Kreymborgs magazine Others: A Magazine of the New Verse. This enabled him to become part of the “[Others] gang”, along with poets such as Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Lola Ridge and William Carlos Williams. During this artistic period, one of Stevens most famous poems, Sunday Morning, was published in a truncated version (Verses 1, 8, 4, 5, 7) by his good friend Harriet Monroe in her journal Poetry. Throughout this work, Stevens appeals to a ‘religion’ of nature, with the “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair” forming the woman’s celebration of “the bough of summer and the winter branch” which form the “measures” of her soul. Stevens balances this with the paganism of the “supple and turbulent ring of men … [with] devotion to the sun” and the bodiless voice which cries “The tomb in Palestine … is the grave of Jesus.” Stevens therefore focuses on the religion of man, be it from a humanist, atheist or Christian point of view, but finishes on an image of pigeons making “Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings,” perhaps suggesting the futility of religion in the natural world. Overall, between the years of 1914 – 1923, Stevens had achieved an astounding amount of publications (over 100 works) which earned him national recognition for his poetical skill through his use of abstractions and ‘exotic imagery.’
With the publication of Harmonium in 1923, Stevens was thrust into the critical spotlight. Critics respected Stevens’ linguistic talent, but his poems, according to Pearson, were seen to embrace the “arts-for-art’s sake” aestheticism which he embraced during his years at Harvard, which was obviously out of place in the aftermath of the war. Apparently scarred from these negative reviews, Stevens turned his back on the literary world to focus on his family and professional life.
After witnessing the Great Depression, Stevens returned to the poetical world and attempted to make his poetry more relevant to actual worldly conditions, deeming this approach the ‘New Romantic’. This development of his poetry resulted in the publication of Ideas of Order (1935) However; in the Pearson collection, critics such as Stanley Burnshaw accused Stevens of being an “acutely conscious” member of “a class menaced by the clashes between capital and labor.” Stevens was therefore criticized again for his seeming inability to address social and political issues through his poetry. Contrary to silencing Stevens once again, the criticism of Ideas of Order spurred him on to publish Owls Clover and The Man with the Blue Guitar and Other Poems within a year of each other (1936 – 37). His maturation and development is best seen in his volume Parts of a World, written between 1937 – 1942, which addresses the need for “cultural continuity” in the face of the horrors seen throughout World War Two. Transport to Summer and Aurora’s of Autumn followed in 1947 and 1950 respectively, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was published in 1954. Stevens’ poetical career culminated with his final publication, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which won the Pulitzer Prize in its year of publication, 1955.
Wallace Stevens is best known for his Modernist verse; in common with poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Hilda Doolittle. His style is an amalgamation of imagism, abstraction, and striking vocabulary. His works demonstrate the fascination he held for being in the ‘middle,’ using this idea to express his connection with both reality and imagination throughout his poems. Stevens was considered one of America’s greatest poets at the end of his life, with this view unchanged in the modern day.
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This biography was prepared by Matthew Billingsley.