NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a major American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his adult life working for an insurance company in Connecticut. His most famous poem is "The Emperor of Ice Cream," which has been anthologized numerous times. Wallace Stevens, sitting photograph This image has been released into the public domain by the copyright holder, its copyright has expired, or it is ineligible for copyright. ... is the 275th day of the year (276th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1879 (MDCCCLXXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... is the 214th day of the year (215th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1955 (MCMLV) was a common year starting on Saturday (link displays the 1955 Gregorian calendar). ... For Christian theological modernism, see Liberal Christianity and Modernism (Roman Catholicism). ... The poor poet A poet is a person who writes poetry. ... , Reading (IPA:) is the county seat of Berks County, Pennsylvania and the center of the Greater Reading Area. ... Official language(s) English Capital Hartford Largest city Bridgeport Largest metro area Hartford Area Ranked 48th - Total 5,543[2] sq mi (14,356 kmÂ²) - Width 70 miles (113 km) - Length 110 miles (177 km) - % water 12. ... The Emperor of Ice Cream is a celebrated poem from Wallace Stevens first collection of poetry, Harmonium. ...

Life and career

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Rachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. (Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar.) A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.^[1] The marriage reputedly became increasingly distant, but the Stevenses never divorced. Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA and a member of the Ivy League. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... For other uses, see Journalist (disambiguation). ... New York Law School is a private law school in Lower Manhattan in New York City. ... // Andrew Cecil Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry Founding of the Poetry Recital Society (now the Poetry Society) T.E. Hulme leaves the Poets Club, and starts meeting with F.S. Flint and other poets in a new group which Hulme referred to as the Secession Club; they meet at the... // Ezra Pound in 1913 Harold Monro founds the Poetry Bookshop in London Ezra Pound travels to London to meet William Butler Yeats, whom he considered the only poet worthy of serious study; from that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound... Sculptor redirects here. ... Elks Memorial in Chicago Adolph Alexander Weinman (December 11, 1870 â€“ August 8, 1952) was an American sculptor, born in Karlsruhe, Germany. ... A dime is a coin minted by the United States with a denomination of 1/10th of a United States dollar or ten cents. ... Walking Liberty Half Dollar A silver half dollar coin issued by the United States government, equal to 50 cents. ...

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.^[2] By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri^[3]. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company^[4] and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice president of the company.^[5] After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955^[6], he was offered a faculty position at Harvard, but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice presidency of The Hartford. Image File history File links Mercury_dime. ... Image File history File links Mercury_dime. ... For the fish called lawyer, see Burbot. ... Nickname: Location in the state of Missouri Coordinates: , Country State County Independent City Government - Mayor Francis G. Slay (D) Area - City 66. ... // July 14 â€” At the first public soiree at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland, Hugo Ball recited the first Dada manifesto (see text). ... {{Infobox_Company | | company_name = The Hartford | | company_logo = | | company_type = Public (NYSE: HIG)| | company_slogan = | foundation = Hartford, USA ([[1810])| | location = Hartford, USA| | key_people = Ramani Ayer, CEO & Chairman| | num_employees = 30,000 (2006)| | industry = Insurance & Finance| | revenue = $28. ... Nickname: Location in Hartford County, Connecticut Coordinates: , Country State NECTA Hartford Region Capitol Region Named 1637 Incorporated (city) 1784 Consolidated 1896 Government - Type Mayor-council - Mayor Eddie Perez Area - City 18. ... The Pulitzer Prize is an American award regarded as the highest national honor in print journalism, literary achievements, and musical composition. ... // The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaums flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith. ...

In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered on the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

Stevens was baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where he spent his last days suffering from terminal cancer.^[7] This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Steven's daughter, Holly. ^[8] After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens was readmitted and died on August 2, 1955 at the age of 75. // The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaums flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith. ...

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine)^[9] was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. // The cover of the first edition of BLAST March â€” The Little Review founded by Margaret Caroline Anderson as part of Chicagos literary renaissance July 2 â€” BLAST, a short-lived journal of the Vorticist movement, is founded with the publication of the first of its total of two editions The... Poetry, published in Chicago, Illinois since 1912, is one of the leading monthly poetry journals in the English-speaking world. ... George Santayana George Santayana (December 16, 1863, Madrid â€“ September 26, 1952, Rome), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Sophocles (ancient Greek: ; 495 BC - 406 BC) was the second of three great ancient Greek tragedians. ...

Poetry

Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the National Book Award in 1951^[10] and 1955.^[11] Harmonium is a 1923 book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens, his first publication in book form. ... // Djuna Barnes, A Book, collection of prose and poetry e. ... The National Book Awards is one of the most preeminent literary prizes in the United States. ... // Bad Lord Byron, a film directed by David Macdonald about the Romantic poet W.H. Auden, Nones Charles Causley, Farewell Aggie Weston Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, highly influential in causing a re-assessment of Pounds poetry Robert Lowell, The Mills of the Kavanaughs Peter Mason Opie... // The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaums flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith. ...

Imagination and reality

Stevens is very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,”^[12] he wrote. 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. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens could write in The Idea of Order at Key West, Imagination is accepted as the innate ability and process to invent partial or complete personal realms within the mind from elements derived from sense perceptions of the shared world. ... For other uses, see Reality (disambiguation). ... Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and ones environment. ...

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." ^[14] 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."^[15] Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape.

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."^[16] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

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”.^[17] Contrast this to the feeling one gets while looking over the water where boats are anchored in darkness, with lanterns hanging on poles, “Arranging, deepening, enchanting night”.^[18] 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

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:

The saxophones squiggle because, as J. 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.”^[21] In the end, reality remains. J. Hillis Miller is an American deconstructive literary critic. ...

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.”^[23]

This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.

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. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that god can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. "[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth." ^[25]

In this way, Stevens’s 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 . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end."^[27] The "first idea" is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. 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. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal..."^[28]

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.”^[29] Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.”^[30] 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. William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 â€“ April 23, 1850) was a major English romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their 1798 joint publication, Lyrical Ballads. ...

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."^[31] In a poem called "Men Made out of Words," he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life.”^[32] 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.”^[33] Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”^[34]

To create a stage is, for Stevens, a metaphor for the need of modern poetry to make its own new arena or realm in which it should be presented and in which it can be understood. Modern poetry is like "an insatiable actor because it continually must be in "the act of finding what will suffice." Stevens puns on the meaning of "act." In one sense, poetry is an act, learning the speech, meeting the women, facing the men, etc. In another sense, it is a dramatic performance meant to be heard by an audience, as it speaks words that echo in the mind of the listener. The audience is "invisible" in the sense that a poet rarely meets his or her readers. The typical reader picks up a book of poems and reads a poem or two, and the author never sees this happening. The reading of poetry is often a conversation between strangers. In this poem the two people are the actor that is the poem and the audience that is the listener, and their emotions should become "one." The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself. The poet, in the act of the poem, finds the sufficing words and for the audience and they allow the listeners to hear what is in their ear, their mind. As a result, the emotions of speaking and listening, of poet as actor and listeners as audience, should become one.

Reputation and influence

From the first, critics and fellow poets recognized Stevens's genius. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium. "There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail."^[36]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. Stevens’s work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have ensured Stevens’s position in the canon as a great poet. 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, A. F. Moritz, John Hollander, and others. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 - January 26, 1968) was an American literary critic and poet, noted as a critic of poetry and embroiled in controversy. ... Photograph of Jarrell in 1956 Randall Jarrell (May 6, 1914 â€“ October 15, 1965), was a United States author, writer and poet. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Helen Hennessy Vendler (b. ... John Frank Kermode (b. ... poet James Merrill, age 30, in a 1957 publicity photograph for The Seraglio James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 - February 6, 1995) was a Pulitzer Prize winning American writer, increasingly regarded as one of the most important 20th century poets in the English language. ... Donald Justice (born in Miami, Florida, August 12, 1925 - died in Iowa City, Iowa, August 6, 2004) was an American poet and teacher of writing. ... John Ashbery John Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. ... Mark Strand (born April 11, 1934) is an American poet, born in Canada. ... Albert Frank Morirtz (born 15 April 1947) is a poet, teacher, and scholar. ... John Hollander (born October 29, 1929) is an American poet and literary critic. ...

Bibliography

Poetry

Harmonium is a 1923 book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens, his first publication in book form. ... // Djuna Barnes, A Book, collection of prose and poetry e. ... // James Laughlin founds New Directions Publishers in New York, which published many modern poets for the first time; New Directions publishes its first book and its first annual, New Directions in Prose and Poetry with contributions from Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others. ... // Djuna Barnes, A Book, collection of prose and poetry e. ... // â€¢ Iowa Writers Workshop founded by Paul Engle at the University of Iowa Dr. Seuss publishes his first book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street John Betjeman, Continual Dew, including The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel David Jones, In Parenthesis Isaac Rosenberg, Collected Works... // T.S. Eliot - Little Gidding Frost Medal: Edgar Lee Masters Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William Rose Benet, The Dust Which Is God October 23 - Douglas Dunn, poet date unknown - Gladys Cardiff, poet date unknown - Konstantin Balmont, poet Poetry List of poetry awards Categories: | | ... // Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time. ... // In 1950, Charles Olson published his seminal essay, Projective Verse. ... // Robert Creeley founds and edits the Black Mountain Review Jack Kerouac reads Dwight Goddards A Buddhist Bible, which will influence him greatly. ... // Howl obscenity trial in San Francisco brings significant attention to beat poetry, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg Donald Hall, Robert Pack and Louis Simpson, New Poets of England and America, anthology (Meridian Books) Harry Ammos, Churchill and Other Poems Dick Diespecker, Windows West Joan Finnegan, through The Glass, Darkly Northrop... // John Betjeman becomes Poet Laureate A.R. Ammons: Briefings: Poems Small and Easy Collected Poems: 1951-1971, winner of the National Book Award in 1973 John Ashbery, Three Poems Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Tom Clark, Back In Boston Again John Berryman, (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux) Elizabeth Bishop and... // January 20 â€” Miller Williams of Arkansas reads his poem, Of History and Hope, at President Clintons inauguration. ...

Prose

References

^ Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988, p. 22.
^ Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986, p. 276.
^ Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 424.
^ Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 445
^ Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 87.
^ Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 423.
^ Maria J. Cirurgião, “Last Farewell and First Fruits: The Story of a Modern Poet.” Lay Witness (June 2000).
^ Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, New York, Random House, 1983, p. 295
^ Wallace Stevens (search results), Poetry Magazine.
^ Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 378.
^ Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 420.
^ Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America, 1997 (Kermode, F., & Richardson, J., eds.), p. 306.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 106.
^ Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous, London: Faber and Faber, 1990 (Milton J. Bates, ed.), p. 185.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 41.
^ Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, New York: Vintage, 1965, p. 154.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 61.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p.106
^ Stevens, The Necessary Angel, supra., p. 6.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 47.
^ Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens." Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, p. 226. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 423.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 444.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 444.
^ Southworth, James G. Some Modern American Poets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. 92.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 136-37.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 330-31.
^ Miller, supra., p. 221
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 343.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 310.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 301.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 310.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 404.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 218.
^ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 218-19.
^ "Wallace Stevens: Biography and Recollections by Acquaintances," Modern American Poetry.

Contents

Life and career

Poetry

Imagination and reality

Supreme fiction

The role of poetry

Reputation and influence

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

References

Further reading

External links

Contents

Life and career var ACE_AR = {Site: '756743', Size: '300250'};

Poetry

Imagination and reality

Supreme fiction

The role of poetry

Reputation and influence

Bibliography

Poetry

Prose

References

Further reading

External links

Life and career