Wallace Stevens

Introduction

To most critics, modernism encompasses a relatively short time in the early 20th century, from approximately 1910, just before World War I, to the beginning of World War II, although some critics believe that the movement began in the late 19th century and continued until 1965. The movement began in Europe, but Americans, especially expatriates, played major roles in it. The modernist period was particularly innovative. Modernism is often considered to include all the "isms" of this era imagism, cubism, Dadaism, abstractionism, and so on and to mark a sense of cultural crisis and radical rupture with the past that became the hallmark of certain artists, literary and otherwise, who created work in the wake of World War I and the early 20th century advancement of industrialization. Regarding modernist ideals of poetic language, Ezra Pound, one of the most important figures of this movement, would issue the famous exhortation to "make it new." The modernist writers do just that: They "make it new," because, for them, this new world could only be adequately reflected in the most innovative paradigms and modes of expression.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, October 2, 1879. In 1897 he enrolled in Harvard as a special student with the hope of eventually becoming a writer. At Harvard he met the philosopher and poet George Santayana, whose belief that poetry must become a replacement for traditional religious faith became central in Stevens' work. After leaving Harvard, Stevens worked as a journalist for the New York Tribune and then entered New York Law School, graduating in 1903. He pursued a career in law, married in 1909, and was hired in 1916 by the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In the second decade of the twentieth century and continuing until his death on August 2, 1955, he led a double life, a businessman during the regular workweek and an avant-garde poet at night and on the weekends. Unlike other poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, he had little contact with other writers. His life revolved around his work at the insurance company, his family, and his interests in travel, classical music, gardening, and poetry. In 1923 he published his first volume, Harmonium, which did not attract much attention. He published little the next ten years. After the insurance company promoted him to vice president in 1934, he began to publish again on a regular basis. Ideas of Order (1935), The Man with the Blue Guitar & Other Poems (1937), Parts of a World (1942), and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) gradually built a respectful and then a devoted audience. The Auroras of Autumn (1950) won the National Book Award and The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954) won another National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize (Spicer, 65-78).

Wallace's Strains in Poetry

In a sense, Stevens synthesizes all the major strains in poetry since the romantics, including the French symbolists and aesthetics of the 1890s, into the ...