Wallace Stevens
(1879–1955)

Wallace Stevens believed that the goal of poetry is to capture the interaction of the imagination and the real world. As a result he spent his career writing poems that delved into the ways in which the physical world is perceived through the imagination.

Stevens was born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Harvard, he worked briefly as a journalist before deciding to attend law school. He practiced law for a short time, then he accepted a job in the legal department of an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. Eventually he became the company's vice-president.

Stevens did not publish his first collection of poetry, Harmonium (1923), until he was over 40. Although the book received little recognition from the general public, it earned praise from critics and other poets. In this book, Stevens uses dazzling imagery to capture the beauty of the physical world, while at the same time expressing the dependence of this beauty on the perceptions of the observer.

During the second half of his life, Stevens published many more volumes of poetry, including Ideas of Order (1935), Parts of a World (1942), Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), and Collected Poems (1955), which earned him the Pulitzer Prize. Despite his success as a poet, however, Stevens continued his career in insurance. He rarely appeared in public and only began giving readings toward the end of his life.

While Stevens's early poems explore the ways in which the imagination shapes reality, his later work tended to be more abstract. He began focusing on such philosophical subjects as death and humanity's relationship with nature. Instead of exploring different ways of perceiving reality, he delved into different ways of contemplating and comprehending reality.

Throughout his career, however, Stevens's goal as a poet was "to help people live their lives." Stevens believed that life in the Modern Age was often uncertain and confusing, and that it was the duty of the poet to provide new ways of understanding the world. By writing poems that help us to see our role in shaping reality, he was able to accomplish his goal.

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