Wallace Stevens was born and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. After attending Harvard University for three years, Stevens moved to New York City, where he went to law school, worked in a number of law firms, and associated with prominent avant-grade artists, including the poets William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. In 1916, he went to work for the Harford Accident and Indemnity Company, and he stayed with the firm for the rest of his life, becoming a vice president in 1934. His quiet life in an upper-class neighborhood in Harford, Connecticut, seemed in sharp contrast with the vitality and sensuousness of so many of his poems. In his early work- dandified, ornate, and musical-Stevens explored the dynamic interplay between reality and the imagination. He adopted a plainer but more abstract style in his later work, both praised and criticized as a “poetry of ideas.” In place of conventional faiths, Stevens posited a Romantic’s belief in poetry, or more precisely, in the regenerative and redemptive act of imaging and reimagining. The poet, Stevens believed, “creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing I and … gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.” (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)
No comments:
Post a Comment