Wallace Stevens was the literary anomaly—the rather humdrum insurance company executive who, with the publication of a single volume, Harmonium, rose to dominance among American aesthetes, the seekers of beauty in art. Pervasive in his shimmering lines are a naturalism and awe that overstep the pessimism that stymied the post–World War I generation. Long into his career, his officemates were surprised to learn that “Wally” was capable of writing such lush, elegantly textured poems, but the critical world had long ranked his verse within the growing modernist canon. Stevens earned respect from literary colleagues for whimsical ironies, skepticism, and the sensuous, ever-shifting intricacy of his vision.
Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, the son of teacher Margaretha Catherine Zeller and attorney Garrett Barcalow Stevens. He studied privately at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran parochial school before entering high school, where he excelled at oratory and classics and wrote for the school newspaper. During three years at Harvard, 1897 to 1900, he contributed to the Harvard Advocate and edited the Harvard Monthly. He initiated an unsuccessful career in journalism at the New York Tribune before enrolling at New York Law School in 1901 and entering a partnership with Lyman Ward in 1904. Stevens married Elsie Viola Kachel; they had one daughter, Holly, and lived in midtown New York from 1909 to 1916. Disdaining American dependence on cars, he began a lifelong habit of walks that took him as far as Greenwich, Connecticut.
After settling into the legal department of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916, Stevens rose to the vice presidency. He was an amateur poet for ten years and earned a reputation for roaming the streets in all weather while composing. Beginning in 1913, he pursued publication in many literary magazines and journals. Like other poets of the era, he was discovered by Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, who made room for the four-stage Phases in a 1914 war issue. After earning the magazine’s $100 prize a second time for the verse play Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise (1915), he saw his one-act work produced at New York’s Provincetown Theatre.
Although Stevens produced a second play, Carlos Among the Candles (1920), first in Milwaukee, then at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse, he discounted drama as his life’s work. He contributed to anthologies for ten years before seeing his poems collected in a volume. With the assistance of critic Carl Van Vechten and publisher Alfred A. Knopf, he issued a first collection, Harmonium (1923), which brought negligible royalties. He followed with Ideas of Order (1935), Owl’s Clover (1936) (winner of a poetry prize from Nation), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Parts of a World (1942), Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), which espouses his personal philosophy, and Transport to Summer (1947). Two collections, The Auroras of Autumn (1950) and The Necessary Angel (1951), earned him the Bollingen Prize, a National Book Award, and a gold medal from the Poetry Society of America.
By studying early twentieth-century poets, Stevens achieved his place among modern poets shortly before his death with Complete Poems of Wallace Stevens, which took a second National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. After his demise from cancer on August 2, 1955, in Hartford, and interment at Cedar Hill Cemetery, eulogies linked the two halves of his life, informing startled colleagues of his importance to twentieth-century American literature.
