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Wallace Stevens |
Wallace Stevens wrote poetry in college. Everyone does. But when he was thirty-four and a lawyer in New York, he published a few poems in Poetry Magazine. In 1923 he published Harmonium, selling one hundred copies with largely negative reviews. The New York Times called it “a glittering edifice of icicles”. In 1931 he published a second edition, but his poems were still hard to understand. He believed, as the Romantics did, that ideas bring meaning to otherwise meaningless experience. Imagination, which he called the “blue guitar”, suggests ideas of order that are entertaining, inspirational, and surprising.
He thought poetry was a way to share such ideas, not by writing a memo about an experience the poet had but by so arranging the images and syntax that they evoked the experience for the reader. Like the paintings of Kandinsky and other abstract artists of his time, he thought art was intended to stimulate an emotion, to cause what Kandinsky called “vibrations in the soul”.
Readers gradually began to understand. While rising to Vice President of a Hartford insurance company, Stevens published five more books. Other poets recognized his work, and in 1951 he received the National Book Award. His Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and other honors followed. When he died in 1954 at the age of seventy-five he was considered one of America’s great poets.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |