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Wallace Stevens |
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The poet-professor is much more of a cliché nowadays than he was in the early decades of this century, when none of the great modernist American poets held regular teaching appointments. Even so, Wallace Stevens stood out among the poets of his time for the wide divergence between his long career as an insurance executive and his "other life" as a poet. An intense Francophile, he never left the North American continent, despite his long life and financial comfort, seeming to prefer to visit a France of his imagining. A social and political conservative, he wrote some of his poetry to satirize and subvert middleclass values, and in so doing he became the author of some of the most highly fanciful and deeply philosophical verse of his or any other time.
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 middleclass.
In the fall of 1892, Stevens began high school at Reading Boys' School, where the rigorous curriculum included Greek and Latin as well as algebra and composition. Showing more interest in football and poker, he failed his freshman year and had to repeat it, an experience that seems to have had the desired affect upon him, since he began to excel at his studies--competing with his brother John, who, one year younger, was now his classmate--and joined the staff of the school's newspaper. In December 1896, he won an essay contest sponsored by the Reading Eagle, an honor that apparently meant a good deal to him, since for the rest of his life he kept the two books that were the first prize. In December of that year, he won an oratory contest at his high school, speaking on the theme of "The Greatest Need of the Age," which in his view was opportunity, and the following June he delivered another speech, described by the Eagle as "patriotic," at his high-school commencement.
In the fall of 1897, Stevens entered Harvard University as a three-year special student. 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 for a "long theme" by submitting a sequence of fifteen sonnets. He published a number of poems, sometimes under foppish pseudonyms, in the Harvard Monthly and in the Harvard Advocate, whose president he became in his last year at Harvard; made friends among other artistically inclined undergraduates, such as fellow poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke (who two decades later would collaborate in a very funny and highly publicized hoax on what they regarded as the excesses of the Imagist movement); and became involved in the cultural currents of the time, including Oriental art and French poetry, whose imaginative qualities represented to him the antithesis of the plainness of American life and landscape.
In addition to writing poetry, he began to keep a journal during his college years, in whose pages he privately expressed the imaginative and artistic side of his nature. In these formative years, he was establishing lifelong patterns in which imagination served not as a principle that guided and transformed his entire being, but rather as an inward alternative to the outward propriety and material success that had been bred in him by his parents and his culture, and that he adhered to for the rest of his life. The conflict between these two sides of Stevens' nature intensified in the summer of 1900, after the completion of his three-year course of studies at Harvard. On June 28, he attended the funeral service in New York City for the writer Stephen Crane, who had died of tuberculosis at twenty-nine, only eight years older than Stevens himself, and was depressed by what he perceived as the lack of respect and recognition for Crane's literary achievements.
Advised by his father to seek employment in either publishing or journalism, Stevens accordingly became a correspondent for the New-York Tribune. After a year, he wished to quit in order to devote himself entirely to writing, but this was a notion strongly rejected by his father, who insisted that he study law instead. Acceding once again, Stevens entered New York Law School in September 1901, graduated in June 1903, and was admitted to the bar in the following year. In the summer of 1903, he accompanied the attorney W. G. Peckham, in whose office he was a law clerk, on a seven-week hunting trip in British Columbia, an experience that so impressed him that, on his deathbed more than fifty years later, he repeatedly described it to his daughter.
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, he began an extensive correspondence with her in which he outlined his theories and ambitions, seeking to turn her into a sort of personal muse. Interestingly, although he made it clear that he had lost his own belief in God, it was important to him that she remain traditionally religious. Meanwhile, he went through a series of positions at several law offices, and was unemployed for an extended period in 1907. In 1908, he began to work for the American Bonding Company, and finally felt sufficiently established to be able to propose to Elsie, which he did at Christmas of that year, after having argued 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.
The couple settled in New York City, where Elsie felt much less at home than her husband. She frequently returned to Reading to visit her mother, and suggested in vain to Stevens that they relocate there. Owing no doubt to these and other differences between them in intellect and temperament, their relationship ultimately became quite cool: business acquaintances of Stevens' in later years noted that he and his wife lived virtually separate lives in different parts of their large house. The deaths of Stevens' father on July 14, 1911 (the two had not spoken since their quarrel), and his mother exactly one year and two days later essentially cut any remaining ties to his native city. In August 1913, Stevens joined the Equitable Surety Company, becoming a vice president the following February. When the firm foundered two years later, he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, with whom he would remain for the rest of his life. In connection with this position, in May of 1916 Stevens and his wife moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where, through several changes of residence, they would continue to live thereafter, and where their only child, a daughter named Holly, was born on August 10, 1924.
Except for two manuscript booklets of rather conventional and sentimental verse that he had presented to Elsie as birthday gifts in 1908 and 1909, Stevens had apparently abandoned the writing of poetry after his college years, while establishing himself in his business career. A catalytic event in his return to poetry was the resumption of his friendship with Walter Conrad Arensberg, a fellow Pennsylvanian (from Pittsburgh) who had been a close friend of Stevens' at Harvard. Arensberg, now living in New York, had been tremendously excited by the famous Armory Show of modernist art in New York City in February 1913 and by the experimental prose of Gertrude Stein, finding in both a freedom and a strangeness that provided a necessary revitalization of artistic expression. Through Arensberg, Stevens began to associate with a group of artists and writers including the avant-garde poets Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams and the French painter Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase had been the most talked-about--and from a conventional viewpoint the most scandalous--piece at the Armory Show. In this period, Stevens wrote a number of brief free-verse poems, often symbolic and/or descriptively gaudy, which expressed an obvious delight in the free play of the imagination, as well as longer, more meditative poems, usually in blank verse. He enjoyed considerable success in placing his work in such leading literary journals as Poetry and Others. Although his move to Hartford, a hundred miles from New York City, took him away from the stimulus of these artistic circles, he continued to write poetry, to correspond with literary friends and acquaintances, and to make new contacts while on business trips. In 1922, he submitted a manuscript of his work to the prestigious firm of Alfred A. Knopf, and the book, entitled Harmonium, was published in September 1923, shortly before his forty-fourth birthday.
Harmonium was, and remains, one of the strangest volumes of verse ever published in America. In over one hundred and twenty pages, its seventy or so poems (many with lengthy and bizarre titles that often seem to have little or nothing to do with the texts that follow) give not the slightest hint or sense of any element of their author's personal life. French phrases abound, as do nonce and at times nonsense words, as Stevens presents variation after variation on his handful of principal themes--the interplay between reality and our perception of it, the necessity of imagination to transfigure and redeem the drabness of life, the search for other forms of meaning to replace the loss of religious belief. The reader who comes upon this volume today is surprised to find that so many of Stevens' finest and best-known poems appeared in this one collection, which also happened to be his first book. On its original appearance, however, Harmonium attracted relatively little notice, falling as it did into some indefinable region between the plainspokenness of Sandburg and Robert Frost and the high seriousness of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Stevens was preoccupied over the next several years by the birth of his daughter, by the pressures of his business career, and by health problems (overweight and suffering from high blood pressure, he followed a prescribed regimen so intensely that he became anemic), and he wrote little or no verse between 1923 and 1930, when a brief surge of composition led to an enlarged edition of Harmonium, after which he fell into another poetic silence of several years.
In 1934, Stevens experienced another resurgence of poetic activity, but this time it was one that would continue for the remaining two decades of his life. Ideas of Order, printed in a limited edition in 1935, was a critical success when it was issued in a trade edition by Knopf the following year, and began to establish Stevens as a significant poet. One of its best and most important pieces was its quasi-title poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," a succinct expression of his essential esthetic. The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), containing two lengthy poetic sequences, was followed by substantial collections in 1942 and 1947. Despite his having felt in his thirties that the only interesting poetry being written at that time was in free verse, in his later work he showed a distinct preference for blank verse, especially in three-line units. As his poems tended to become longer and more consistently complex, their diction became less decorative and more direct. Despite the strong philosophical orientation of his work, his angle of approach continued, by and large, to be as it was expressed in the title of the last poem in his last collection: "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself." Stevens' increased poetic productivity was no doubt stimulated by the relatively settled circumstances of his later life, although he experienced conflicts with his daughter that were strikingly similar to those he had gone through with his father, taking issue with her educational plans and later quarreling seriously with her over her choice of a husband.
In the last years of his life, Stevens was awarded several honorary doctorates and literary prizes. The Auroras of Autumn (1950) won the National Book Award, then considered by some to be more prestigious than the Pulitzer Prize. His Collected Poems (1954), published on his seventy-fifth birthday, brought him a National Book Award and the Pulitzer as well. 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 was converted to Catholicism.
Given the rarefied nature of both his manner and his subject matter, Stevens will no doubt always be something of a specialized taste, but lovers of great poetry cannot fail to be delighted and stimulated by his superb craftsmanship, his richness of imagination in both language and description, and his subtle investigations into the nature of reality and our perceptions of it. His work has been consistently available for the last fifty years, biographical and critical studies of him continue to abound, and he is customarily short-listed with Frost, Eliot, Williams, and Pound as one of the giants of American poetry in the first half of the twentieth century.
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