Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was born on 2 October 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of a prosperous lawyer. He attended Harvard as a special student (1897–1900), where he wrote for the Advocate and was president of the literary magazine, studied at New York Law School, and was admitted to the bar in 1904. In 1916 he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut, where he rose to vice president and remained for the rest of his life. He never gave up the day job. The double life — corporate executive by day, one of the greatest poets of the century by night — is one of the strangest careers in American letters.

Life and Career

Stevens married Elsie Viola Kachel in 1909; their relationship was increasingly distant. They had one daughter, Holly, in 1924. Stevens was a large, physically imposing man, a lover of fine food and wine, and a solitary worker who composed poems on his long walks to the office. He drank socially and was involved in a famous incident in 1936 when he reportedly punched Ernest Hemingway at a party in Key West (Hemingway knocked him down; accounts vary).

His first collection, Harmonium (1923), published when he was forty-three, was issued by Knopf in an edition of 1,500 copies. It sold poorly — fewer than 100 copies in the first two years — but contained some of the most brilliant poems of the American century: “Sunday Morning,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.” The poems were dazzling, sensuous, witty, and philosophically dense.

After a seven-year silence, Stevens resumed publishing with Ideas of Order (1935), followed by The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), and The Auroras of Autumn (1950). The Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Stevens died of stomach cancer on 2 August 1955 in Hartford. There are persistent but unverified reports that he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed.

Major Works and Themes

Stevens’s lifelong subject is the relationship between imagination and reality — the power of the mind to create meaning in a world from which God has withdrawn. He is the great secular metaphysician of American poetry: his poems are meditations on perception, beauty, the nature of fiction, and the human need for “a supreme fiction” to replace the religious certainties that modernity has destroyed.

Harmonium (1923) is the exuberant, sensuous masterpiece — poems of extraordinary colour, sound, and inventiveness. “Sunday Morning,” a woman’s meditation on mortality and pleasure on a Sunday when she does not go to church, is one of the finest poems of the century.

“The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937), a long poem in thirty-three sections inspired by Picasso’s The Old Guitarist, is Stevens’s most sustained meditation on the artist’s relationship to reality: “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

The late poems — “The Auroras of Autumn,” “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The World as Meditation” — are sparser, more austere, and more philosophically demanding. They are Stevens at his deepest.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Stevens was largely overlooked during the 1920s and 1930s, when Eliot and Pound dominated the modernist landscape. His reputation grew steadily from the 1940s onward, and by the time of his death he was widely recognised as one of the major American poets. Since then his stature has only increased. He is now ranked alongside Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost as one of the essential American poets, and his influence on subsequent poetry — from John Ashbery to Jorie Graham to Louise Glück — is immense.

Key Works

• Harmonium (1923; revised 1931)
• Ideas of Order (1935)
• The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)
• Parts of a World (1942)
• Transport to Summer (1947)
• The Auroras of Autumn (1950)
• The Collected Poems (1954) — Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award
• The Necessary Angel (1951) — essays

Collecting Stevens

Wallace Stevens is one of the most important American poetry collecting authors, with Harmonium as the crown jewel.

Harmonium (1923, Knopf, New York) was published in an edition of 1,500 copies, of which fewer than 100 sold in the first year. First editions in the original striped boards with the dust jacket are rare and bring $10,000–$40,000. Without the jacket, copies in good condition bring $2,000–$8,000. The revised edition (1931, Knopf), with fourteen poems added and three removed, is also collected.

Ideas of Order (1935) was first published by the Alcestis Press in a limited edition of 165 copies, followed by a Knopf trade edition in 1936. The Alcestis Press edition is scarce and brings $3,000–$10,000.

The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937, Knopf) and subsequent Knopf editions are more widely available at $500–$2,000 in fine condition with jacket.

Stevens was not a prolific signer. He was a private man who did not participate in public literary culture in the way that many of his contemporaries did. Signed copies are uncommon and carry significant premiums. His correspondence — notably the letters collected by Holly Stevens in Letters of Wallace Stevens (1966) — is of high literary value.