Stevens, Wallace
Stevens, Wallace( 1879–1955),Pennsylvania-born poet, educated at Harvard (1897–1900) and at New York University Law School, made his business career as an executive of an insurance firm in Hartford, Conn. The few early poems he chose to save appear among later work in Harmonium (1923), published when he was almost 44, but most of his poetry was written after he was 50, although its gaiety, vitality, and exotic imagination give no sense that it is the work of a man of such age and with a full-time business. His earliest poems have the finish, the elegant wit, the bizarre images, the lush figures, and the recondite diction that characterize all his work.
His poems range from descriptive and dramatic lyrics to meditative and discursive discourse, but all show a deep engagement in experience and in art. His musical verse, rich in tropic imagery but precise and intense in statement, is marked by concern with means of knowledge, with...
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