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Biography
Born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania, Wallace Stevens
spent three years at Harvard, left to begin a literary career,
and then went to law school so he could secure a dependable
job. He joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company
in Connecticut and wrote poetry at night and during summers.
Although Stevens participated in literary circles early in
his career, he was concerned with neither artistic nor political
causes and found that individual activity was more conducive
to exploring his interest: the relationship between observer
and observed. In his early poetry Stevens reconfigured the
ideas of American Transcendentalism: he too positioned the
individual as perceiver at the center of society but, unlike
the Transcendentalists, Stevens could not be certain that
the individual's perceptions came from God. In a modern world
where Christianity was losing power, he looked for belief
and in later poems suggested that poetry may forge a new
faith. His collections of poems include Harmonium (1923), Ideas
of Order (1935), Parts of a World (1942), and The
Auroras of Autumn (1950). Stevens also published a book
of his lectures, The Necessary Angel (1951).
Explorations
Wallace Stevens spent most of his adult life as a prosperous
business executive who wrote daring, arcane poetry as an
avocation. After World War II, Stevens was surprised to find
himself becoming the center of attention on American university
campuses, where new generations of students and academics
were drawn to his evocative and difficult verse. In fact,
interpreting Stevens's poetry is such a major industry in
English departments that a reader first encountering his
work in an anthology must take care to meet his verse as
poetry, rather than as intellectual puzzle. Sunday Morning (1915),
one of Stevens's most famous poems, is a good place to begin. 1. The opening two stanzas of Sunday Morning impressionistically
describe an unnamed woman in a vaguely tropical setting,
apparently staying home on Easter Sunday rather than going
to church. Comment on the peculiarities of the description:
what details are offered, and what is withheld? What is
gained and sacrificed by this cryptic presentation of a
dramatic situation?
2. When the solitary woman in her peignoir speaks, do
her words sound like plausible human speech? Whom is she
speaking to? Why does Stevens give her these words and
rhythms? And why is she not allowed to talk for more than
a sentence or two at a time?
3. What is the relationship of the speaker to this woman
and this scene? The woman is troubled by a crisis of faith;
is the speaker? Does he sound above it all, philosophically
or aesthetically detached from this and all problems having
to do with belief, with meaning? Or does he implicitly
have and somehow indicate a stake in this inquiry?
4. In other poems in the NAAL selection, Stevens
often assumes the voice of the bemused aesthete, the "magnifico" musician,
or magisterial observer. What traditions in American verse
is he resisting by assuming this stance? What effects does
this stance have in individual poems?
5. There are several poems here about dreams and fictions,
even when the problems being confronted are vast: death,
faith, the meaning of human experience. What do you make
of these fictions? Does Stevens seem to think they are
inherently empty or a waste of human effort? Where do you
see indications of his views?
Other sites to consult:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=125&CFID=10178891&CFTOKEN=96327670:
A biography from the Academy of American Poets.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/wstevens/stevens.html: The Web
site of the Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens.
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