This Sunday night’s poet, the last of 2023, is Wallace Stevens, a contemporary and friend of William Carlos Williams. Like Williams he had a fairly demanding day job, in his case as an executive at a life insurance company.
Stevens seems to me someone of an artistic and (perhaps to his contemporaries) “unmasculine” temperament who, led first by his father (who demanded he go to law school in order to be able to earn a living) and then perhaps by his own choice, split himself into two pieces:
On the one hand we have Wallace Stevens the corporate vice president, ensconced in the world of business, living in the upper-middle-class environs of suburban Connecticut, and enjoying manly pursuits like fishing trips to Key West—on one of which of which he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway. (Stevens also shared in the casual racism so prevalent at the time—no one today would think of titling a poem “Like Decorations in a N----r Cemetery,” as Stevens once did.)
On the other hand, there’s the Wallace Stevens who hoped as a youth to make a living as a writer, enjoyed the artistic life of New York City, and wrote and published esoteric poetry that his fellow businessmen could neither understand nor appreciate.
Those who knew Stevens at his work thought him “cold.” Since we’re starting winter here in the northern hemisphere, I thought I’d go with perhaps his coldest poem, “The Snow Man”:
One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Wallace Stevens.
- Internet Archive:
- The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. This is the original 1954 edition, later corrected and revised (see below).
- Bookshop.org:
- The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens. This “selected poems” collection (edited by Stevens’s daughter) is a good place to start reading Stevens.
- The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: The Corrected Edition (Revised), edited by Chris Beyers and John N. Serio. As it says in the title, this is a corrected version of the original 1954 edition.
- Other:
- Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, by Helen Vendler. As a critic of poetry, Helen Vendler is an acquired taste; to my mind she often goes overboard in her “close reading” of poems. But I think she’s particularly good in her writing about Wallace Stevens, whose poetry I think rewards close reading, and whose sensibilities were alike to Vendler’s. As she writes in the introduction to this book, “[Stevens] is the poet whose poems I would have written had I been the poet he was.”
- _On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems, by Helen Hennessy Vendler. This is another Vendler work on Stevens worth seeking out if you like her criticism.
