Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American Modernist poet whose work fused philosophical inquiry with sensuous imagery, earning him recognition as one of the most original poetic voices of the twentieth century. He produced his celebrated verse while working as a vice president of an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, an arrangement that gave him both financial independence and creative privacy.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens attended Harvard University and later New York Law School, gaining admission to the bar in 1904. He joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916 and remained there for the rest of his life, rising to executive rank while quietly composing poems during his daily walks to and from the office.

His debut collection, Harmonium, appeared in 1923 and introduced now-anthologized works such as "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Subsequent volumes including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction developed his meditation on imagination as the human counterforce to a disenchanted reality.

Stevens received the Bollingen Prize in 1950, the National Book Award twice, and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems. He died of stomach cancer in Hartford that August, only months after the Pulitzer announcement, and is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery.

The name Wallace comes from the Anglo-Norman French waleis, meaning "foreigner" or "Welshman," originally applied to the Brittonic-speaking inhabitants of southwestern Scotland. Made famous across the English-speaking world by the medieval Scottish patriot Sir William Wallace, it suits a man whose poetry stood apart from every fashion of his century.