Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) -

A Giant of 20th Century Poetry

by Glen MacLeod

Wallace Stevens was one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, along with T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and William Carlos Williams. He lived most of his life in Hartford where he was a lawyer and insurance executive as well as a poet. Almost all of his poems were written in Hartford.

His Life

Stevens was born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, attended Harvard University, and after college moved to New York City. There he first tried newspaper work, then went to law school. In 1916 he moved to Hartford to take a job at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (now known as The Hartford), where he eventually became a Vice President. From 1932 onward he lived with his wife and daughter at 118 Westerly Terrace in Hartford, near Elizabeth Park. Every day he would walk the two-mile route from his house to his office in the company’s main headquarters on Farmington Avenue in downtown Hartford. Often he composed poems along the way. The route he walked along Asylum Avenue is now designated the Wallace Stevens Walk, punctuated at intervals with thirteen markers of Connecticut granite, each stone engraved with one stanza from his poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” You can find out more about the Wallace Stevens Walk—and see photographs of Stevens’s house and his office building—on the website of the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens. He is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.

His Poetry

Stevens was a late bloomer in the world of poetry. He did not publish his first book, Harmonium (1923), until he was 44 years old. He wrote some of his best poems in old age, like “The River of Rivers in Connecticut” and “The Plain Sense of Things.” When his Collected Poems was published in 1954, one year before he died, it won both the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize.

In his early years working for The Hartford, Stevens traveled around the country working on insurance claims. His references to places like Oklahoma and Tennessee reflect that experience. But he spent most of his career working in Hartford which is the setting for a number of poems, including “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,” “The River of Rivers in Connecticut,” “Vacancy in the Park,” “Nuns painting Water-Lilies,” “The Plain Sense of Things,” and “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” (all included in this anthology).

Stevens and Visual Art – The Wadsworth Atheneum

Hartford is home to the Wadsworth Atheneum which, according to its website, is the “oldest continuously-operating public art museum in the United States.” Wallace Stevens loved the Wadsworth. He often visited there on his lunch hour, returning multiple times to view exhibitions he particularly liked. It was at the Wadsworth that he was able to see, in 1934, the first retrospective exhibition in the world of the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, the most famous twentieth-century artist. Picasso inspired Stevens’s long poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (not included in this anthology). For Stevens, poetry was closely related to painting, as the beginning of one section of that long poem suggests:

Is this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard
Of destructions”, a picture of ourselves,

Now, an image of our society? . . .

One particular painting Stevens liked in the Wadsworth’s collection is Composition in Blue and White (1935) by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Mondrian invented a purely abstract kind of painting, using only primary colors (red, yellow, blue), straight lines, and right angles. Mondrian’s abstract art was one inspiration for Stevens’s long poem titled “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (not included in this anthology).

Another of Stevens’s favorite exhibitions at the Wadsworth was “The Painters of Still-Life” in 1938. Still-life painting focuses on inanimate objects (like flowers, fruit, pottery, glassware), usually arranged on a table. This exhibition inspired Stevens to write a series of still-life poems. “The Poems of Our Climate” (included here) is one of those still-life poems.

Strategies for Reading Stevens’s Poetry

Stevens is a Modernist poet, like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams, who were all writing in the early twentieth century. The Modernists were most interested in creating new, original, unconventional kinds of poetry. They are constantly trying to surprise the reader. This kind of poetry is challenging.and requires a different kind of reading. In order to appreciate it, we need to slow down, pay close attention to the words, and read the poems more than once.

To give beginning readers a “handle” on Wallace Stevens, this anthology includes a brief commentary on each poem. The best way to approach Stevens is not to worry too much, at first, about what the poems mean. Of course, the poems do have meanings, but they are often not clear on a first reading and critics often argue about them. My best advice for first-time readers of his poetry is this: try to enjoy the poems even though you may not understand them completely. Stevens’s poems offer many pleasures if you open yourself up to them: the beauty of the wording—surprising turns of phrase, unusual rhythms and patterns of sound; the vivid imagery; his wild imagination and quirky humor; his fascination with the way our minds interact with and shape the world we live in. Reading the poems aloud is often the simplest way to begin experiencing these pleasures.