Wallace Stevens(1879–1955)

Wallace Stevens was born at Reading in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on the second of October 1879, second son of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a small-town Pennsylvania attorney and partner in a Reading legal-and-insurance firm, and Margaretha Catharine Zeller, a Reading schoolteacher of Pennsylvania-German descent. He was raised in the Reading Lutheran tradition, was schooled at the Reading Boys' High School, took the BA at Harvard in 1900 in his twenty-first year as a special student (he took three of the four Harvard undergraduate years and then accepted a New York Tribune reporter's job rather than completing the fourth year for the degree), worked as a reporter through 1900 to 1901, and entered the New York Law School in October 1901. He took the LL.B. in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904 in his twenty-fifth year.

He worked through the next thirteen years at various small New York City legal-and-insurance firms, married Elsie Viola Kachel of Reading in September 1909, joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company at its New York office in 1916 in his thirty-seventh year, moved to the Hartford head office in Connecticut in 1916, and rose through the company over the next thirty-eight years to Vice President in 1934. He held the Vice Presidency until his death. He composed his poetry across the same period on the walks between his Westerly Terrace house and the Hartford head office on Asylum Avenue (the long Hartford walks of approximately one mile each way, on which he composed by dictating to himself and writing down at lunch, became the central single biographical fact of his composing practice).

He published his first poem in The Trend in November 1914 in his thirty-fifth year (the unusually late beginning of a major poetry career) and his first volume Harmonium in September 1923 in his forty-fourth year. Harmonium contains the foundational early works on which his world reputation rests: The Snow Man, Sunday Morning, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Anecdote of the Jar, The Comedian as the Letter C, and the opening Peter Quince at the Clavier. He published the further volumes Ideas of Order (1936, the title poem the The Idea of Order at Key West), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Esthétique du Mal (1944), Transport to Summer (1947) and The Auroras of Autumn (1950).

He delivered through 1942 to 1951 at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, the Bard College, the Mount Holyoke College and the Chicago Arts Club the long sequence of essay-lectures that he collected in 1951 as The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, including the central single essay The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words (1942, the central American modernist-poetic statement of the imagination as defence against reality). He published The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens in 1954 in his seventy-fifth year and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award for Poetry the following spring. He died at the Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford on the second of August 1955 in his seventy-sixth year. The Stevens name in modern American letters carries the weight of the six volumes and the Hartford-walks composing practice.