Poet Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was a major 20th century American poet dedicated to an exploration of the possible relations between reality and imagination. Stevens writes in an abstract and strikingly musical verse that is difficult to place in the literary tradition. He had a lifelong concern with the bearing of language on the philosophical problem of knowledge, giving his poetry the flavor of philosophical inquiry and an affinity for certain 20th century philosophers. Stevens lived a conventional and uneventful life, and indeed the nature of his life is fascinating given the depth of his poetry. He worked most of his life as a vice-president of an insurance company, a job as far from what we envision as the poetic life as possible. This disparity is one of the most interesting things about Stevens, whose poetry is in no way simple and whose range of thought is broadly philosophical. Apparently, Stevens kept his business and literary lives completely separate, and one can speculate that the two complemented one another in an intere

Related Essays

Poems by Wallace Stevens & Robert Frost .... the words "loneliness" and "lonely" they take on the quality of a physical description of the deserted landscape, which the poet goes on the .... Stevens, Wallace. .... (1762 7 )

"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" In 1942, Wallace Stevens wrote a 650-line poem called Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction .... He believed that a poet's words are of things that do not exist without the .... (530 2 )

Metaphors in Poetry Vincent Millay, and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. .... In the first line of the fourth stanza the poet makes a sharp correction .... (1721 7 )

Selected American Literature .... revelations of a rather disagreeable personality; as a poet, Frost appears to .... The poetic vision of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and HD Doolittle .... (3876 16 )

Poems by 4 Poets A poet's selection of a particular aspect of the relationship between humanity .... Wallace Stevens (1875-1955) develops Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird as .... (1928 8 )

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