Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Introduction

Although Wallace Stevens never has had as large an audience as that enjoyed by Robert Frost and did not receive substantial recognition until several years before his death, he is usually considered to be one of the best five or six English-language poets of the twentieth century. 

Strongly influenced by early nineteeth century English poets, Stevens became a modern Romantic who transformed and extended the English Romantic tradition as he accommodated it to the twentieth century world. Harmonium and subsequent volumes reveal his assimilation of the innovations of avant-garde painting, music, poetry, and philosophy. One finds in his canon, for example, intimations of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Henri Bergson, and of cubism, Impressionism, Imagism, and Symbolism. Such influences were always subordinated to the poet’s romantic sensibility, however, which struggled with the central Romantic problem—the need to overcome the gulf between the inner, human reality and outer, objective reality. A secular humanist who rejected traditional Christianity, arcane mysticism, and the pessimism of The Waste Land (1922) and the Cantos (beginning in 1925), he succeeded as a Romantic poet in the modern world. His contribution to poetry was recognized in 1950 with the award of the Bollingen Prize and in 1955 with the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. His reputation has continued to grow since his death in 1955.