Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens, (1879-1955). US poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens attended Harvard (1897-1900) and later trained for the bar. He then worked for many years as a lawyer to an insurance firm, becoming its vice-president in 1934. Although Stevens published a few pieces in magazines and anthologies, poetry remained a private spare-time activity; his first collection, Harmonium (1923), did not appear until lie was 44. In the 1930s and 1940s a series of landmark collections established Stevens as one of the most gifted and original poets of the century; these include Ideas of Order (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), and The Auroras of Autumn (1950). His work, which is extremely difficult to categorize, shows the influence of both European Symbolism and the US romantic tradition of Whitman and Emerson. Its major theme is the interaction between the external world and man as perceiver and creator.
