Wallace Stevens

I

Introduction

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet, whose works deal mainly with the individual’s interaction with the outside world. Stevens used sensuous, elaborate imagery and elevated, precise word choice to express subtle philosophical themes. He frequently contrasted the bleakness and monotony of modern industrialized life with the richness of nature.

II

Life and Works

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens was educated at Harvard University. He then worked as a journalist in New York City before attending New York Law School. Stevens was admitted to the bar in 1904 and in 1909 married Elsie Moll, who was also from Reading. In 1916 Stevens joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut, and he became a vice president at the firm in 1934. He worked there, despite his increasing success as a poet, until his death.

Stevens's first published work appeared in 1914 in Poetry magazine. Harmonium (1923) was his first collection of verse. It contains some of his best known poems, including “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” 'Sunday Morning,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Later works of poetry included Ideas of Order (1935), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), which is often considered his masterpiece, and The Auroras of Autumn (1950). In 1955 Stevens’s Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in poetry. Opus Posthumous (1957) appeared after his death, containing previously unpublished prose and poetry. Many of Stevens’s critical essays are included in The Necessary Angel (1951). The Letters of Wallace Stevens appeared in 1966.

III

Themes and Philosophy

Stevens's poems celebrate the natural world and view the poet as the one who discovers harmony in the world's chaos. In this celebration, much of Stevens’s poetry has a strong sense of natural elements and processes, examples of which abound throughout his work: “the spontaneities of rain or snow” (“Owl’s Clover,” 1936), “the effortless weather turning blue” (Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction), “The one moonlight, the various universe, intended / So much just to be seen” (“Note on Moonlight,” 1954).

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According to Stevens, the natural world—however harsh and constraining it can be—is humankind’s only source of certainty, even above religion. In “Sunday Morning” he writes: “We live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night, / Or island solitude, unsponsored, free.” The earth in this poem is luxurious and fertile—“all of paradise that we shall know.” Stevens offers the earth as a substitute for religious faith, which can come “only in silent shadows and in dreams.”

This dependence on the natural world is balanced by Stevens's other major theme—his view that people can know the world only indirectly, through subjective interpretation. In Stevens’s view, the world outside is inevitably transformed within each person’s mind into something apart from the real world, into something different from “things as they are.” The imagination's recomposition of “the eye's plain version” of things then becomes each person’s version of the real world.

Stevens’s philosophy can be seen in “The Idea of Order at Key West” (1936), in which a woman singer, who is a personification of the human mind and imagination, walks beside the sea, which symbolically represents the physical universe. By singing, the singer creates her world: “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang.” Music in this poem—and in much of Stevens’s work—represents the flow of sensory experience as it is being transformed within the mind. Through song or experience, the mind conceives its own sense of the world: “. . . there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

Stevens's long work Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction consists of a prologue, three sections making up the body of the work and titled respectively “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure,” and an epilogue. The work as a whole suggests that people always must believe in a fiction, and that this fiction, or faith in a way of interpreting the world, helps to give meaning to life. For Stevens the supreme fiction was poetry: “Soldier, there is a war between the mind / And sky, between thought and day and night. It is / for that the poet is always in the sun...”.