It’s the birthday of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), who was perhaps the 20th century’s most brilliant American poet and who possessed “a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism” (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens). Yet by day, Stevens was a successful insurance executive, eventually becoming vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company.
Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, to a lawyer and former schoolteacher, studied at Harvard but didn’t graduate, worked as a journalist and found it dull, and finally took Daddy’s advice to go to law school, graduating in 1903 from the New York Law School.
While practicing law in New York City, Stevens was also writing poetry and making friends with the likes of William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. (Stevens and Williams were consummate grownups and balanced poetry with real-life jobs; Williams delivered 3,000 babies in his career as a doctor. I just bet they both wore hats.) Stevens also during this time fell in love with the beautiful Elsie Viola Kachel, of whom his parents strongly disapproved. Stevens married her anyway and cut off all ties with his parents, and the marriage was a fairly big disaster. (Don’t you hate it when your parents are sort of right?) They stayed married, however, even after Elsie kicked Stevens out of bed for good. They had one daughter, Holly.
In 1916 the Stevenses moved to Hartford for that insurance job and Stevens eventually completed his first book of poems, Harmonium (1923), composing during his commute to and from his office and in the evenings. Among his other collections are Ideas of Order (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and Collected Poems (1954), which won him the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Fun fact: Stevens led a very quiet, three-piece-suit kind of life, but he had his moments, especially when drinking. Once, at a party in Key West, he insulted Ernest Hemingway; when Hemingway showed up, the two engaged in fisticuffs. Stevens broke his own hand punching Hemingway in the jaw—a brilliant example of self-correcting behavior—and Hemingway pounded him good. Stevens later apologized.
Stevens’ poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” begins:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean…
Read the rest here.
Have a thoughtful, poetic, dripping Wednesday, make sure your insurance policies are up to date, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.
Stevens is my favourite poet by far. I want excerpts from “Sunday Morning” read at my memorial service. That he worked a regular job as an insurance exec probably helped in some ways … Apparently he wrote poems on scraps of paper while walking to work. Also, per the New Yorker, he “‘hated depression—hated it.’ So do a lot of people, but few fight it as tenaciously as Stevens did. He relied, for stability, on the routine demands of his office job.” Sometimes obstacles, boundaries, limitations help shape a writer.
I absolutely agree that routines, boundaries, limitations can help shape a writer–even as those same things can help shape poetry or fiction itself. Now I want to read “Sunday Morning,” which I haven’t before. Thanks for the recommendation.