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 interesting way, with the regularity of the insurance business allowing Stevens to live his poetic life more fully after work, as it were.
Stevens's poetry makes use of recurring ideas, a symbolic sense of color, and musical rhythms to convey complex philosophical concepts, many related to the act of creating poetry itself. It is interesting to ask whether his poetry could have been as dense and powerful as it is if he had not had the "second" and seemingly more prosaic life as an executive.
In "Peter Quince at the Clavier," Wallace Stevens both discusses the meaning of music as it relates to the spiritual and creates a musical experience in the poetry that delves into the spiritual. Stevens uses repeated sounds and a careful selection of sounds to create a sense of the music being created in the poem, while at the same time mirroring his own statement that music feeling rather than sound.
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