Wallace Stevens - (1879-1955)
|
I. Biography Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, the second of five children of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a farmer's son, and Margaretha
Catharine (Zeller) Stevens, the daughter of a shoemaker. Both of his parents were of Dutch-German descent, and both had become schoolteachers when very young. His father had then studied law and been admitted to
practice at the age of twenty-four. Largely at the insistence of his mother, who read Bible selections to the family every night and sang and played hymns every Sunday evening,
Stevens attended Sunday school at the First Presbyterian Church in Reading and the grammar school of St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church. Between his mother's piety and
his father's business ethic, his parents created a family atmosphere that was solidly and conventionally Protestant and upwardly striving middle-class.
More than any other modern poet, Stevens was concerned with the intensity of the imagination. He wrote poems in and out of his home, taking up almost all of his time leaving
little for anything else. Though now considered one of the major American poets of the century, he wasn't truly recognized until the publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death. His major works include
"Ideas of Order" (1935), "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (1937), "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" (1942), and a collection of essays on poetry, The Necessary Angel
(1951). Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949. In 1951, he won the National Book Award in Poetry for "The Auroras of Autumn"
. In 1955, he won it a second time for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1955.
In April 1955, Stevens underwent surgery for diverticulitis, during which procedure it was discovered that he was suffering from an advanced case of cancer of the stomach. He
spent the next several months alternating between stays in various hospitals and periods of rest at home, until his death on August 2, 1955, exactly two months short of his
seventy-sixth birthday. On his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism. II. Wallace Stevens and His Career In 1897, Stevens entered Harvard University; he was there for three years. Following his
father's advice, he undertook a practical course of studies, but earned only a C in economics, while doing much better in courses in composition and literature (English,
French, and German). He once fulfilled a composition course assignment of fifteen sonnets. He published a number of poems in the Harvard Monthly and in the Harvard Advocate. He
became the president of the Advocate in his last year at Harvard. Advised by his father to seek employment in either publishing or journalism, he became a correspondent for the New-York Tribune
. After a year at the Tribune, he wanted to quit in order to work entirely on writing poetry, but this was a notion strongly rejected by his
father, who insisted that he study law instead. Following his father's advice again, Stevens entered law school in September 1901 and graduated in June 1903.
Home in Reading for the summer of 1904, Stevens met Elsie Moll, an eighteen-year-old girl of such striking beauty that she later became the model for the Liberty-head dime and the
Liberty half-dollar. On his return to New York, Stevens began a relationship with Elsie. In 1908, he began to work for the American Bonding Company and was financially
established enough to be able to propose to Elsie, which he did at Christmas of that year. He did this after arguing with his father over his family's disapproval of his choice. When
Stevens and Elsie were married at Grace Lutheran Church in Reading on September 21, 1909, no members of his family attended the ceremony.
In August 1913, Stevens joined the Equitable Surety Company, becoming a vice president the following February. When the firm went bankrupt two years later, he joined the
Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, which he stayed with for the rest of his life. Since the job was in Hartford, in May of 1916 Stevens and his wife moved there. Their only
child, Holly, was born in Hartford on August 10, 1924. III. Literary Works Selected Poems IV. Links
Harmonium, 1923
Ideas of Order, 1935
Owl's Clover, 1936
The Man With the Blue Guitar, 1937
Parts of the World, 1942
Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, 1942
|Esthétique du Mal, 1945
Three Academic Pieces, 1947
Transport to Summer, 1947
Primitive Like an Orb, 1948
Auroras of Autumn, 1950
Collected Poems, 1954
Opus Posthumous, 1957
The Palm at the End of the Mind, 1967
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/bio.htm
V. Audio (Under "Recordings")
VI. Interview 1954 interview from the New York Times VII. Sources
http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/wstevens.htm
This essay was submitted by a student of Cheryl Petersohn, a teacher at Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.