Stevens, Wallace 1879-1955 (Peter Parasol)

PERSONAL:

Born October 2, 1879, in Reading, PA; died of cancer, August 2, 1955, in Hartford, CT; buried in Cedar Hills Cemetery, Hartford; son of Garrett Barcalow (a lawyer) and Margaretha Catharine (a schoolteacher) Stevens; married Elsie Viola Kachel, September 21, 1909; children: Holly Bright. Education: Attended Harvard University, 1897-1900; New York Law School, LL.B., 1903. Hobbies and other interests: Collecting paintings, walking.

CAREER:

Writer, poet, essayist, lecturer, and insurance lawyer. New York Tribune, New York, NY, reporter, 1900-01; law clerk for W.G. Peckham in New York, NY, 1903-04; admitted to the Bar in New York State, 1904; law partner with Lyman Ward, c. 1904; worked in various law firms in New York, NY, 1904-08; American Bonding Co. (became Fidelity and Deposit Co.), New York, NY, lawyer, 1908-13; Equitable Surety Co. (became New England Equitable Insurance Co.), New York, NY, resident vice president, 1914-16; Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., Hartford, CT, 1916-55, became vice president, 1934. Lecturer.

MEMBER:

National Institute of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Prize from Players Producing Co., c. 1916, for "Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise"; Levinson Prize from Poetry, 1920; poetry prize from Nation, 1936; Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, 1946; Bollingen Prize in Poetry, 1950; gold medal from the Poetry Society of America, 1951; National Book Award for best poetry, 1951, for The Auroras of Autumn; National Book Award for best poetry and Pulitzer Prize for poetry, both 1955, both for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens; L.H.D., from Hartt College of Music, 1955; Litt.D., from Bard College, 1951, Harvard University, 1951, Mount Holyoke College, 1952, Columbia University, 1952, and Yale University, 1955.

WRITINGS:

Harmonium (poetry; includes "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "The Comedian as the Letter C, " "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Sunday Morning," "Sea Surface Full of Clouds," and "In the Clear Season of Grapes"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1923, revised edition, 1931, reprinted, edited by Frank Kermode, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Ideas of Order (poetry; includes "Farewell to Florida," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Academic Discourse at Havana," "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," and "A Postcard from the Volcano"), Alcestis Press (New York, NY), 1935, enlarged edition, Knopf (New York, NY), 1936.

Owl's Clover (poetry; also see below), Alcestis Press (New York, NY), 1936.

The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems (poetry; includes "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "A Thought Revolved," and "The Men That Are Falling"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1937.

Parts of a World (poetry; includes "The Poems of Our Climate," "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," and "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1942.

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (poetry), Cummington Press (Cummington, MA), 1942.

Esthetique du Mal (poetry), Cummington Press (Cummington, MA), 1945.

Transport to Summer (poetry; includes "The Pure Good of Theory," "A Word with Jose Rodriguez-Feo," "Description without Place," "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," and "Esthetique du Mal"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1947.

Three Academic Pieces: The Realm of Resemblance, Someone Puts a Pineapple Together, Of Ideal Time and Choice (essays), Cummington Press (Cummington, MA), 1947.

A Primitive Like an Orb (poetry), drawings by Kurt Seligmann, Gotham Book Mart (New York, NY), 1948.

The Auroras of Autumn (poetry; includes "The Auroras of Autumn," "Large Red Man Reading," "In a Bad Time," "The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract," "Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and "A Primitive Like an Orb"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1950.

The Relations between Poetry and Painting (lecture), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), 1951.

Selected Poems, chosen and with a foreword by Dennis Williamson, Fortune Press (London, England), 1952, Faber (New York, NY), 1953.

Raoul Duly: A Note (nonfiction), Pierre Beres (New York, NY), 1953.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (includes "The Rock," previously unpublished section featuring "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain," "A Quiet Normal Life," "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "The Rock," "The Planet on the Table," and "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself"), Knopf (New York, NY), 1954, reprinted, Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

Opus Posthumous (includes Owl's Clover and essays "The Irrational Element in Poetry," "The Whole Man: Perspectives, Horizons," "Preface to Time of Year," "John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean," and "Adagia"), edited by Samuel French Morse, Knopf (New York, NY), 1957, reprinted, Random House (New York, NY), 1982.

Poems by Wallace Stevens, edited by Samuel French Morse, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1959.

The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (essays; includes "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," "Effects of Analogy," "The Realm of Resemblance," "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together," and "Of Ideal Time and Choice" from Three Academic Pieces), Faber (New York, NY), 1960.

Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by daughter, Holly Stevens, Knopf (New York, NY), 1966.

The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, Knopf (New York, NY), 1971.

Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America (New York, NY), 1997.

Study of Two Pears (poem, in French and English), translated by Bernard Noel; mezzotints by Judith Rothchild, Verdigris (Octon, France), 2003.

Wallace Stevens (poems), edited by John N. Serio, illustrations by Robert Gantt Steele, Sterling Publishing Company (New York, NY), 2004.

The Emperor of Ice-cream, and Other Poems, Dover Publications (Mineola, NY), 2005.

The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, edited by J. Donald Blount, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 2006.

Also author of preface to William Carlos Williams's Collected Poems, 1921-1931, Objectivist Press, 1934.

Author of plays Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise, 1916, Carlos among the Candles, 1917, and Bowl, Cat, and Broomstick, c. 1917.

Contributor to numerous books and anthologies, including Modern American Poetry, The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, and The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Contributor to periodicals, including Accent, American Letters, Botteghe Oscure, Broom, Contact, Dial, Halcyon, Horizon, Hound and Horn, Kenyon Review, Life and Letters Today, Little Review, Measure, Modern School, Nation, New Republic, Others, Poetry (some works published under pseudonym Peter Parasol, c. 1914), Poetry London, Quarterly Review of Literature, Rogue, Secession, Soil, Southern Review, Voices, and Wake.

ADAPTATIONS:

Poems from Harmonium were set to music by Vincent Persichetti to form a song cycle; "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was set to music by John Gruen to form a song cycle and by J. Wisse to form a secular cantata; "Six Significant Landscapes" was set to music for voice and piano by Claire Brook.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. He was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a willfully difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker, and that reputation has continued since his death. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time."

Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. His family belonged to the Dutch Reformed Church, and when Stevens became eligible he enrolled in parochial schools. Stevens's father contributed substantially to his son's early education by providing their home with an extensive library and by encouraging reading. At age twelve Stevens entered public school for boys and began studying classics in Greek and Latin. In high school he became a prominent student, scoring high marks and distinguishing himself as a skillful orator. He also showed early promise as a writer by reporting for the school's newspaper, and after completing his studies in Reading he decided to continue his literary pursuits at Harvard University.

Encouraged by his father, Stevens devoted himself to the literary aspects of Harvard life. By his sophomore year he wrote regularly for the Harvard Advocate, and by the end of his third year, as biographer Samuel French Morse noted in Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life, he had received all of the school's honors for writing. In 1899 Stevens joined the editorial board of the Advocate's rival publication, the Harvard Monthly, and the following year he assumed the board's presidency and became editor. By that time Stevens had already published poems in both the Advocate and the Monthly, and as editor he additionally produced stories and literary sketches. Because there was a frequent shortage of manuscript during his tenure as editor, Stevens often published several of his own works in each issue of the Monthly. He thus gained further recognition on campus as a prolific and multi-talented writer. Unfortunately, his campus literary endeavors ended in 1900 when a shortage of family funds necessitated his withdrawal from the university.

Leaving Harvard was hardly a setback, though, for Stevens was not working toward a college degree and was not particularly invigorated by the school's literary environment. Once out of Harvard, Stevens decided to work as a journalist, and shortly thereafter he began reporting for the New York Evening Post. He published regularly in the newspaper, but he found the work dull and inconsequential. The job proved most worthwhile as a means for Stevens to acquaint himself with New York City. Each day he explored various areas and then recorded his observations in a journal. In the evenings he either attended theatrical and musical productions or remained in his room writing poems or drafting a play.

Stevens soon tired of this life, however, and questioned his father on the possibility of abandoning the newspaper position to entirely devote himself to literature. But his father, while a lover of literature, was also prudent, and he counseled his son to cease writing and commence law studies. Stevens heeded the advice, and in October 1901 he enrolled at the New York School of Law. Two years later Stevens graduated, and in 1904 he was admitted to the New York Bar. He then worked briefly in a law partnership with former Harvard classmate Lyman Ward. After parting from Ward, Stevens worked for various law firms in New York City. In 1908 he accepted a post with the American Bonding Company, an insurance firm, and he stayed with the company when it was purchased by the Fidelity and Deposit Company.

Stevens's early years with the insurance firm brought great personal change. Financially secure, he proposed marriage to Elsie Viola Kachel, who accepted and became his wife in September 1909. Two years later Stevens's father died, and in 1912 his mother also died. During this period Stevens apparently wrote no poetry, but he involved himself in New York City's artistic community through his association with several writers, including poets Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. Of keen interest to Stevens at this time were the art exhibitions at the many museums and galleries in the city. He developed a fondness for modern painting, eventually becoming a connoisseur and collector of Asian art, including painting, pottery, and jewelry. He particularly admired Asian works for their vivid colors and their precision and clarity, qualities that he later imparted to his own art.

By 1913 Stevens was enjoying great success in the field of insurance law. Unlike many aspiring artists, however, he was hardly stifled by steady employment. He soon resumed writing poetry, though in a letter to his wife he confided that writing was "absurd" as well as fulfilling. In 1914 he nonetheless published two poems in the modest periodical Trend, and later that year he produced four more verses for Harriet Monroe's publication, Poetry. None of these poems were included in Stevens's later volumes, but they are often considered his first mature writings.

After he began publishing his poems Stevens changed jobs again, becoming resident vice president, in New York City, of the Equitable Surety Company (which, in turn, became the New England Equitable Company). He left that position in 1916 to work for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained employed for the rest of his life, becoming vice president in 1934.

This period of job changes was also one of impressive literary achievements for Stevens. In 1915 he produced his first important poems, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and "Sunday Morning," and in 1916 he published his prizewinning play, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise. Another play, Carlos among the Candles, followed in 1917, and the comic poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" appeared in 1918. During the next few years Stevens began organizing his poems for publication in a single volume. For inclusion in that prospective volume he also produced several longer poems, including the masterful "Comedian as the Letter C." This poem, together with the early "Sunday Morning" and "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," proved key to Stevens's volume Harmonium when it was published in 1923.

Harmonium bears ample evidence of Stevens's wide-ranging talents: an extraordinary vocabulary, a flair for memorable phrasing, an accomplished sense of imagery, and the ability to both lampoon and philosophize. "Peter Quince at the Clavier," among the earliest poems in Harmonium, contains aspects of all these skills. In this poem, a beautiful woman's humiliating encounter with lustful elders becomes a meditation on the nature of beauty (and the beauty of nature). Stevens vividly captures the woman's plight by dramatically contrasting the tranquility of her bath with a jarring interruption by several old folk. Consistent with the narrator's contention that "music is feeling," the woman's plight is emphasized by descriptions of sounds from nature and musical instruments. The poem culminates in a reflection on the permanence of the woman's physical beauty, which, it is declared, exists forever in memory and through death in the union of body and nature: "The body dies; the body's beauty lives. / So evenings die, in their green going, / A wave, interminably flowing."

"Peter Quince at the Clavier," with its notion of immortality as a natural cycle, serves as a prelude to the more ambitious "Sunday Morning," in which cyclical nature is proposed as the sole alternative to Christianity in the theologically bankrupt twentieth century. Here Stevens echoes the theme of "Peter Quince at the Clavier" by writing that "death is the mother of beauty," thus confirming that physical beauty is immortal through death and the consequent consummation with nature. Essentially an analysis of one woman's ennui, "Sunday Morning" ends by stripping the New Testament's Jesus Christ of transcendence and consigning him, too, to immortality void of an afterlife but part of "the heavenly fellowship / of men that perish." In this manner "Sunday Morning" shatters the tenets, or illusion, of Christianity's spiritual afterlife and substantiates nature—the joining of corpse to Earth—as the only channel to immortality. In her volume Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston perceived the replacement of Christianity with nature as the essence of the poem, and she called "Sunday Morning" the "revelation of a secular religion."

Less profound, perhaps, but no less impressive are Harmonium's comedic highlights, "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" and "The Comedian as the Letter C." In "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" the narrator, a middle-aged poet, delivers an extended, rather flamboyantly embellished monologue to love in all its embodiments and evocations. He reflects on his own loves and ambitions in such carefree detail that the work seems an amusing alternative to T.S. Eliot's pessimistic poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Like "Sunday Morning," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" celebrates change, and it further suggests that even in fluctuation there is definition—" that fluttering things have so distinct a shade."

In the mock epic "Comedian as the Letter C" Stevens presents a similarly introspective protagonist, Crispin, who is, or has been, a poet, handyman, musician, and rogue. The poem recounts Crispin's adventures from France to the jungle to a lush, Eden-like land where he establishes his own colony and devotes himself to contemplating his purpose in life. During the course of his adventures, Crispin evolves from romantic to realist and from poet to parent, the latter two roles being, according to the poem, mutually antagonistic. The poem ends with Crispin dourly viewing his six daughters as poems and questioning the validity of creating anything that must, eventually, become separate from him.

"The Comedian as the Letter C" is a fairly complex work, evincing Stevens's impressive, and occasionally intimidating, vocabulary and his penchant for obscure humor. Stevens later declared that his own motivations in writing the poem derived from his enthusiasm for "words and sounds." He stated: "I suppose that I ought to confess that by the letter C I meant the sound of the letter C; what was in my mind was to play on that sound throughout the poem. While the sound of that letter has more or less variety … all its shades may be said to have a comic aspect. Consequently, the letter C is a comedian."

Although the aforementioned poems are perhaps the most substantial in Harmonium, they are hardly the volume's only noteworthy ones. Also among the more than fifty poems that comprise Stevens's first book are "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," an imagistic poem highly reminiscent of the Japanese poetry form haiku, and "The Emperor of Ice Cream," an eloquent exhortation that death is an inevitable aspect of living. These and the other entries in Harmonium reveal Stevens as a poet of delicate, but determined, sensibility, one whose perspective is precise without being precious, and whose wit is subtle but not subdued.

Some critics, such as Harriet Monroe, the founder and first editor of Poetry, reacted favorably toward Harmonium. Few other critics, however, shared Monroe's enthusiasm, or even her familiarity, concerning Harmonium following its publication in 1923. The book was ignored in most critical quarters, and it was dismissed as a product of mere dilettantism by some of the few reviewers that acknowledged Stevens's art. Although apparently undaunted by the poor reception accorded Harmonium, Stevens produced only a few poems during the next several years. Part of this unproductiveness was attributed by Stevens to the birth of his daughter, Holly, in 1924. Like his autobiographical character Crispin, Stevens found that parenting thwarted writing. In a letter to Harriet Monroe he noted that the responsibilities of parenthood were a "terrible blow to poor literature."

In 1933, nine years after his daughter's birth, Stevens finally resumed writing steadily. The following year he published his second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, and in 1935 he produced an expanded edition of that same work. The poems of Ideas of Order are, generally, sparer and gloomier than those of Harmonium. Prominent among these bleak works is "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," comprised of fifty verses on subjects such as aging and dying. Perhaps in reference to these fifty short verses, the racist title refers to the litter that, in Stevens's opinion, accumulated in blacks' cemeteries. He ends this poem by noting the futility of attempts to thwart nature and by commending those individuals who adapt to change: "Union of the weakest develops strength / Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge / One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn? / But the wise avenges by building his city in snow.

Stevens more clearly explicates his notion of creative imagination in "The Idea of Order in Key West," among the few invigorating poems in Ideas of Order and one of the most important works in his entire canon. In this poem Stevens writes of strolling along the beach with a friend and discovering a girl singing to the ocean. Stevens declares that the girl has created order out of chaos by fashioning a sensible song from her observations of the swirling sea. The concluding stanza extolls the virtues of the singer's endeavor ("The maker's rage to order words of the sea") and declares that the resulting song is an actual aspect of the singer. In his book Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem, Frank Doggett called the concluding stanza Stevens's "hymn to the ardor of the poet to give order to the world by his command of language."

Following the publication of Ideas of Order, Stevens began receiving increasing recognition as an important and unique poet. Not all of that recognition, however, was entirely positive. Some critics charged that the obscurity, abstraction, and self-contained, art-for-art's-sake tenor of his work were inappropriate and ineffective during a time of international strife that included widespread economic depression and increasing fascism in Europe. Stevens, comfortably ensconced in his half-acre home in Hartford, responded that the world was improving, not degenerating further. He held himself relatively detached from politics and world affairs, although he briefly championed leading Italian fascist Benito Mussolini, and contended that his art actually constituted the most substantial reality. "Life is not people and scene," he argued, "but thought and feeling. The world is myself. Life is myself."

Stevens contended that the poet's purpose was to interpret the external world of thought and feeling through the imagination. Like his alter-ego Crispin, Stevens became preoccupied with articulating his perception of the poet's purpose, and he sought to explore that theme in his 1936 book, Owl's Clover. But that book, comprised of five explications of various individuals' relations to art, proved verbose and thus uncharacteristically excessive. Immensely displeased, Stevens immediately dismantled the volume and reshaped portions of the work for inclusion in a forthcoming collection.

That volume, The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems succeeded where Owl's Clover failed, presenting a varied, eloquently articulated contention of the same theme of the poet, and therefore the imagination, as the explicator of thought and feeling that had undone him earlier. In the title poem, Stevens defends the poet's responsibility to shape and define perceived reality: "They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.’ / The man replied, ‘Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.’" For Stevens, the blue guitar was the power of imagination, and the power of imagination, in turn, was "the power of the mind over the possibility of things" and "the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal."

The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems, particularly the thirty-three-part title poem, constituted a breakthrough for Stevens by indicating a new direction: an inexhaustive articulation of the imagination as the supreme perception and of poetry as the supreme fiction. Harold Bloom, in acknowledging Stevens's debacle Owl's Clover, described The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems as the poet's "triumph over … literary anxieties" and added that with its completion Stevens renewed his poetic aspirations and vision. "The poet who had written The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Other Poems had weathered his long crisis," Bloom wrote, "and at fifty-eight was ready to begin again."

In subsequent volumes, Stevens singlemindedly concentrated on his idea of poetry as the perfect synthesis of reality and the imagination. Consequently, much of his poetry is about poetry. In his next collection, Parts of a World, his writing frequently adopts a solipsistic perspective in exemplifying and explicating his definition of poetry. Such poems as "Prelude to Objects," "Add This to Rhetoric," and "Of Modern Poetry" all address, to some extent, the self-referential nature of poetry. In "Of Modern Poetry" Stevens defined the genre as "the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind." In Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Susan B. Weston wrote that in "Of Modern Poetry," as with many poems in Parts of a World, "Stevens cannot say what the mind wants to hear; he must be content to write about a poetry that would express what the mind wants to hear, and to render the satisfaction that might ensue." She added, "Stevens's is a conditional world indeed."

Stevens followed Parts of a World with Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, which is usually considered his greatest poem on the nature of poetry. This long poem, more an exploration of a definition than it is an actual definition, exemplifies the tenets of supreme fiction even as it articulates them. The poem is comprised of a prologue, three substantial sections, and a coda. The first main section, titled "It Must Be Abstract," recalls Harmonium's themes by hailing art as the new deity in a theologically deficient age. Abstraction is necessary, Stevens declares, because it fosters the sense of mystery necessary to provoke interest and worship from humanity. The second long portion, "It Must Change," recalls "Sunday Morning" in citing change as that which ever renews and sustains life: "Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace / And for the particulars of rapture come." And in "It Must Give Pleasure," Stevens expresses his conviction that poetry must always be "a thing final in itself and, therefore, good: / One of the vast repetitions final in themselves and, therefore, good, the going round / And round and round, the merely going round, / Until merely going round is a final good, / The way wine comes at a table in a wood." Notes toward a Supreme Fiction concludes with verses describing the poet's pursuit of supreme fiction as "a war that never ends." Stevens, directing these verses to an imaginary warrior, writes: "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, / Patches the moon together in his room / to his Virgilian cadences, up down, / Up down. It is a war that never ends." This is perhaps Stevens's most impressive description of his own sense of self, and in it he provides his most succinct appraisal of the poet's duty.

Although Notes toward a Supreme Fiction elucidates Stevens's notions of poetry and poet, it was not intended by him to serve as a definitive testament. Rather, he considered the poem as a collection of ideas about the idea of supreme fiction. Writing to Henry Church, to whom the poem is dedicated, Stevens warned that it was not a systematized philosophy but mere notes— "the nucleus of the matter is contained in the title." He also reaffirmed his contention that poetry was the supreme fiction, explaining that poetry was supreme because "the essence of poetry is change and the essence of change is that it gives pleasure."

Notes toward a Supreme Fiction was published as a small volume in 1942 and was subsequently included in the 1947 collection, Transport to Summer. Also featured in the collection is Esthetique du Mal, another long poem first published separately. In this poem, Stevens explores the poetic imagination's response to specific provocations: pain and evil. Seconding philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Stevens asserts that evil is a necessary aspect of life, and he further declares that it is both inspirational and profitable to the imagination. This notion is most clearly articulated in the poem's eighth section, which begins: "The death of Satan was a tragedy / For the imagination. A capital / Negation destroyed him in his tenement / And, with him, many blue phenomena." In a later stanza, one in which Bloom found the poem's "central polemic," Stevens emphasizes the positive aspect of evil: "The tragedy, however, may have begun, / Again, in the imagination's new beginning, / In the yes of the realist spoken because he must / Say yes, spoken because under every no / Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken." In Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Bloom called Esthetique du Mal Stevens's "major humanistic polemic" of the mid-1940s.

In 1950 Stevens published his last new poetry collection, The Auroras of Autumn. The poems in this volume show Stevens further refining and ordering his ideas about the imagination and poetry. Among the most prominent works in this volume is "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," which constitutes still another set of notes toward a supreme fiction. Here Stevens finds the sublime in the seemingly mundane by recording his contemplations of a given evening. The style here is spare and abstract, resulting in a poem that revels in ambiguity and the elusiveness of definitions: "It is not the premise that reality / Is solid. It may be a shade that traverses / A dust, a force that traverses a shade." In this poem, Stevens once again explicates as the supreme synthesis of perception and the imagination and produces a poem about poetry: "This endlessly elaborating poem / Displays the theory of poetry, / As the life of poetry." Other poems in The Auroras of Autumn are equally self-reflexive, but they are ultimately less ambitious and less provocative, concerned more with rendering the mundane through abstraction and thus prompting a sense of mystery and, simultaneously, order.

Stevens followed The Auroras of Autumn with a prose volume, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination, in which he articulates his poetic notions without resorting to abstraction and obfuscation. In the essay "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" he addresses the imagination's response to adversity, and in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet" he once again champions the imagination as the medium toward a reality transcending mere action and rationalization. Consistent in the volume is Stevens's willingness to render his ideas in a precise, accessible manner. Thus The Necessary Angel considerably illuminates his poetry.

By the early 1950s, Stevens was regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers. Despite this widespread recognition, Stevens kept his position at the Hartford company, perhaps fearing that he would become isolated if he left his lucrative post. In his later years with the firm, Stevens amassed many writing awards, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the 1951 National Book Award for The Auroras of Autumn, and several honorary doctorates. His greatest accolades, however, came with the 1955 publication of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and another National Book Award. In this volume Stevens gathered nearly all of his previously published verse, save Owl's Clover, and added another twenty-five poems under the title "The Rock." Included in this section are some of Stevens's finest and most characteristically abstract poems. Appropriately, the final poem in "The Rock" is titled "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself," in which reality and the imagination are depicted as fusing at the instant of perception: "That scrawny cry—it was / A chorister whose c preceded the choir. / It was part of the colossal sun, / Surrounded by its choral rings, / Still far away. It was like / A new knowledge of reality.

After publishing his collected verse Stevens succumbed increasingly to cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized. He died in August 1955. In the years since his death Stevens's reputation has remained formidable. The obscurity and abstraction of his poetry has proven particularly appealing among students and academics and has consequently generated extensive criticism. Among the most respected interpreters of Stevens's work are Helen Hennessy Vendler, who has demonstrated particular expertise on the longer poems, and Harold Bloom, whose Wallace Stevens: The Poems ofOur Climate is probably the most provocative and substantial, if also dense and verbose, of the many volumes attending to Stevens's entire canon. For Bloom, Stevens is "a vital part of the American mythology."

A new collected edition of Stevens's work appeared in 1997. Collected Poetry and Prose, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, contains the complete text of all of Stevens's poetry, as well as his prose writings about poetry and related subjects. The editors also include an extensive selection of other material, including short stories, reviews, criticism, speeches, philosophical writings, and more. The book provides scholarly notes and assessment of the texts, as well as an index to titles and first lines. "Stevens did for American poetic language what Saul Bellow was to do for prose, extending its boundaries, taking in the magniloquent, the arcane, the plainspoken, the gaudy, the low-rent," remarked Algis Valiunas in Commentary. Library Journal contributor Michael Rogers called the book an "outstanding volume" and found it to be "the single finest collection" of Stevens's work produced to date. "It is possible that some men are born to be surety-claims wizards; Stevens became one incidentally. Poetry is what he was made for, and he made the grandest claims for it," observed Valiunas. "Poetry was what he had," Valiunas continued, "and, even if one might prefer he did something else with it, he does what he does about as well as it can be done."

In The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, edited by J. Donald Blount, Stevens reveals much of the poetry of his heart in a collection of 272 letters sent to his wife, Elsie Viola Kachel. The letters span the twenty-five years of the couple's time together, from their early courtship to later married life. The circumstances of their lives required that they spend considerable time apart, even after their marriage. They lived apart—Stevens in New York, Kachel in Pennsylvania—during the five years of their courtship. Even after they were married in 1909, Stevens was frequently absent because of the demands of his work in the insurance field. Letter-writing was their means of communication during these times. Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, writing in Christianity and Literature, noted that the letters in this book represent only a fraction of the missives that were traded between husband and wife; intensely protective of her privacy, Elsie destroyed most of their correspondence after her husband's death. "Still, these letters prove, without question, that Elsie was for Stevens an important, even pivotal figure haunting his poetry throughout his life—whether positively (as in his early, ‘slight’ poetry) or negatively (in subsequently sardonic, even bitter poems of his middle years)," Brogan stated. This collection of letters to the woman who became his wife will let "readers understand Stevens's poetry by illuminating his personality and giving insight into his continuing devotion to an often-troubled relationship," commented Nancy R. Ives in Library Journal.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Alvarez, A., Stewards of Excellence: Studies in Modern English and American Poets, Scribner (New York, NY), 1958.

Baird, James, The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1968.

Bates, Milton J., Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1985.

Beckett, Lucy, Wallace Stevens, Cambridge University Press (London, England), 1974.

Benarnou, Michel, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1972.

Berry, S.L., Wallace Stevens, Creative Education (Mankato, MN), 1997.

Blackmur, R.P., The Double Agent: Essays in Craft and Elucidation, Peter Smith, 1962.

Blessing, Richard Allen, Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium," Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1970.

Bloom, Harold, Figures of Capable Imagination, Seabury (New York, NY), 1976.

Bloom, Harold, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 1976.

Bornstein, George, Transformations of Romanticism in Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1976.

Boroff, Marie, Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1979.

Boroff, Marie, editor, Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1963.

Brazeau, Peter, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, Random House (New York, NY), 1983.

Brown, Ashley, and Robert S. Haller, editors, The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, Lippincott (Philadelphia, PA), 1962.

Brown, Merle E., Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1970.

Burney, William, Wallace Stevens, Twayne (New York, NY), 1968.

Buttel, Robert, Wallace Stevens: The Making of "Harmonium," Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1967.

Buttel, Robert, and Frank Doggett, editors, Wallace Stevens: A Celebration, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1980.

Doggett, Frank, Stevens' Poetry of Thought, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1966.

Doggett, Frank, Wallace Stevens: The Making of the Poem, Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 1980.

Donaghue, Denis, Connoisseurs of Chaos: Ideas of Order in Modern American Poetry, Faber (London, England), 1965.

Donaghue, Denis The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature, Faber (London, England), 1968.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin, editor, Wallace Stevens: A Critical Anthology, Penguin (New York, NY), 1973.

Enck, John J., Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1964.

Filreis, Alan, Modernism from Right to Left: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties & Literary Radicalism, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Hines, Thomas J., The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1976.

Kenner, Hugh, A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers, Knopf (New York, NY), 1975.

Kermode, Frank, Wallace Stevens, Oliver & Boyd, (New York, NY), 1960.

Kessler, Edward, Images of Wallace Stevens, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1972.

LaGuardia, David M., Advance on Chaos: The Sanctifying Imagination of Wallace Stevens, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 1983.

Lentricchia, Frank, The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1968.

Lentricchia, Frank, Modernist Quartet, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Litz, A. Walton, Introspective Voyager: The Poetic Development of Wallace Stevens, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1972.

Lombardi, Thomas F., Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone: The Influence of Origins on His Life and Poetry, Susquehanna University Press (Selinsgrove, PA), 1996.

McCann, Janet, Wallace Stevens Revisited: "The Celestial Possible," Twayne (New York, NY), 1995.

McNamara, Peter L., editor, Critics on Wallace Stevens, University of Miami Press (Miami, FL), 1972.

Morris, Adalaide Kirby, Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1974.

Morse, Samuel French, Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life, Pegasus (New York, NY), 1970.

Murphy, Charles, M., Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Nasser, Eugene Paul, Wallace Stevens: An Anatomy of Figuration, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1965.

O'Connor, William Van, The Shaping Spirit: A Study of Wallace Stevens, Regnery (Chicago, IL), 1950.

Pack, Robert, Wallace Stevens: An Approach to His Poetry and Thought, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1958.

Perlis, Alan, Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, Bucknell University Press (Lewisburg, PA), 1976.

Rae, Patricia, The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound, and Stevens, Associated University Presses (Cranbury, NJ), 1997.

Richardson, Joan, Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, Morrow (New York, NY), 1986.

Riddel, Joseph N., The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1965.

Rosu, Anca, The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens, University of Alabama Press (Tuscaloosa, AL), 1995.

Schulze, Robin G., The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1995.

Serio, John N., Wallace Sevens: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography, University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, PA), 1994.

Serio, John N., Teaching Wallace Stevens: Practical Essays, University of Tennessee Press (Knoxville, TN), 1994.

Sexson, Michael, The Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Edwin Mellen Press (New York, NY), 1981.

Stern, Herbert J., Wallace Stevens: Art of Uncertainty, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1966.

Stevens, Holly, Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens, Knopf (New York, NY), 1977.

Sukenick, Ronald, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1967.

Tindall, William York, Wallace Stevens, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1961.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 3, 1980, Volume 12, 1984.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1969.

Vendler, Helen Hennessy, Wallace Stevens, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1986.

Voros, Gyorgyi, Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1997.

Wells, Henry W., Introduction to Wallace Stevens, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1964.

Weston, Susan B., Wallace Stevens: An Introduction to the Poetry, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1977.

Whiting, Anthony, The Never-Resting Mind: Wallace Stevens' Romantic Irony, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1996.

Woodman, Leonora, Stanza My Stone: Wallace Stevens and the Hermetic Tradition, Purdue University Press (West Lafayette, IN), 1983.

Woodward, Kathleen, At Last, the Real Distinguished Thing: The Later Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams, Ohio State University Press (Columbus, OH), 1980.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, February 15, 2006, George Cohen, review of The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, p. 32.

Christian Century, September 24, 1997, review of Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, p. 851.

Christianity and Literature, autumn, 2006, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, review of The Contemplated Spouse, p. 184.

Commentary, January, 1998, Algis Valiunas, review of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 56.

Library Journal, November 1, 1997, Michael Rogers, review of Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, p. 121; March 1, 2006, Nancy R. Ives, review of The Contemplated Spouse, p. 86.

Theological Studies, March, 1998, Richard M. Liddy, review of Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, p. 189.

Theology Today, January, 1998, Robert Coles, review of Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age, p. 531.