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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Courtesy The Economist.

Wallace Stevens
Born October 2, 1879(1879-Template:MONTHNUMBER-02)
Reading, Pennsylvania, United States
Died August 2, 1955(1955-Template:MONTHNUMBER-02) (aged 75)
Hartford, Connecticut, United States
Occupation Poet, Insurance Executive
Nationality American
Period 1914-1955
Literary movement modernism
Notable work(s) Harmonium, The Idea of Order at Key West, The Man With the Blue Guitar, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction
Spouse(s) Elsie Viola Kachel (married 1909-1955)
Children Holly Stevens (born 1924)


Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955) was a major modernist American poet.

Life[]

Overview[]

His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar", "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock", "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Peter Quince at the Clavier", "The Snow Man", "Sunday Morning" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", all of which appear in his Collected Poems (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955).

Youth and education[]

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903.

Marriage[]

On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886-1963, aka Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer.[1] After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her lower-class. As the New York Times reported in an article in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime".[2]

A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.[3]

Mercury dime obverse

Mercury dime, 1941. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the Stevenses never divorced.[2]

Career[]

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired on January 13, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company.[4] By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri.[5]

Wallace Stevens House - Hartford, CT

Stevens's home in Connecticut. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company[6] and left New York City to live in Hartford, Connecticut, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company.[7] (After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford.)[8]

From 1922 to 1940, Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, where he generally lodged at the Casa Marina, a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He originally visited in January 1922, while on a business trip. "The place is a paradise," he wrote to Elsie, "midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen."[9] The influence of Key West upon Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his earliest 2 collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order.[10]

In February 1935, Stevens encountered poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens had been drunk and acted inappropriately.[11] The following year, Stevens allegedly assaulted Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West.[12] Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized.[13] In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the 2 men argued.[14]

In the 1930s and 1940s, Stevens was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered on artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

Stevens may have been baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer.[15] This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly.[16] There is also no record of Stevens' "baptism," although all Roman Catholic priests are required to record the baptisms that they perform.[2]

After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens was readmitted and died on August 2, 1955, at the age of 75. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery.

Political views[]

Stevens was politically conservative[17] [18] described by critic William York Tindall as a Republican in the mold of Robert Taft.[19]

Writing[]

Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His earliest major publication (4 poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry magazine)[20] was written at the age of 35 (although as an undergraduate at Harvard, he had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life). Many of Stevens' canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time,[21] no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

Stevens's debut collection of poetry, a volume of rococo inventiveness titled Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced 2 other major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and 3 more in the 1940s.

Imagination and reality[]

Stevens, whose work was meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas.[21] "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,"[22] he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in The Idea of Order at Key West,

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.[23]

In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption."[24] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible."[25] Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape.

As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."[26] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

The jar is a striking example of an order that does not feel a part of the land, and so seems to violate the existing order: "It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee."[27] Contrast this to the feeling one gets while looking over the water where boats are anchored in darkness, with lanterns hanging on poles, "Arranging, deepening, enchanting night"[28] When the imagination is available to reality and does not try to force itself, reality becomes like a bar of sand onto which the imagination naturally washes and recedes.

The imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment - a particular time, place and culture - and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in his or her normal life between the influence the world has on imagination and the influence imagination has on the way we view the world.

For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well-conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world.

Supreme fiction[]

The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.[29]

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a Supreme Fiction, an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed.[30] In this example from the satirical "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:

Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.[31]

The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: "A great many of Stevens poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement."[32] In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.

I am the angel of reality,
seen for a moment standing in the door.
...
I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash;
...
an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?[33]

In 1 of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, "This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing." This one thing is "a light, a power, the miraculous influence" wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a comforting order, -A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind."[34]

This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.

We say God and the imagination are one . . .
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.[34]

Stevens concludes that God is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. "[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth." [35]

. . . Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,
Ourselves in poetry must take their place[36]

In this way, Stevens's poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. "The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end."[37] The "first idea" is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality - a reality that must always be qualified - and as such, always misses the mark to some degree - always contains elements of unreality.

Miller summarizes Stevens's position: "Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal . . . ."[38]

The role of poetry[]

Stevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet "tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination's Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima."[39] Moreover, "The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate."[40] In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.

These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, "It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self."[41] In a poem called "Men Made out of Words," he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life."[40] Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, "The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was."[42] Modern poetry is "the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice."[43]

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.[44]

His poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" is a self-conscious digression about the creation of poetry.[21]

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.

To create a stage is, for Stevens, a metaphor for the need of modern poetry to make its own new arena or realm in which it should be presented and in which it can be understood. Modern poetry is like "an insatiable actor" because it continually must be in "the act of finding what will suffice." Stevens puns on the meaning of "act." In one sense, poetry is an act, learning the speech, meeting the women, facing the men, etc. In another sense, it is a dramatic performance meant to be heard by an audience, as it speaks words that echo in the mind of the listener. The audience is "invisible" in the sense that a poet rarely meets his or her readers. The typical reader picks up a book of poems and reads a poem or two, and the author never sees this happening. The reading of poetry is often a conversation between strangers. In this poem the two people are the actor that is the poem and the audience that is the listener, and their emotions should become "one." The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself. The poet, in the act of the poem, finds the sufficing words and for the audience and they allow the listeners to hear what is in their ear, their mind. As a result, the emotions of speaking and listening, of poet as actor and listeners as audience, should become one.

Reputation and influence[]

From the start,, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, "There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail."[45] In the 1930s, the critic Yvor Winters criticized Stevens as a decadent hedonist but acknowledged his great talent. Beginning in the 1940s, critics such as Randall Jarrell spoke of Stevens as a major living American poet, even if they did so (as Jarrell did) with certain reservations about Stevens's work.

Stevens's work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the canon as a great poet. Many poets – James Merrill and Donald Justice most explicitly – have acknowledged Stevens as a major influence on their work, and his impact may also be seen in John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, John Hollander, and others.

Recognition[]

Stevens received the National Book Award in 1951,[46] and again in 1955.[47]

He won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his Collected Poems.[48]

In popular culture[]

In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The book included the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The etchings were inspired by and were meant to represent the themes of Stevens's poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which was inspired by a 1903 painting by Pablo Picasso titled "The Old Guitarist". It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.

Nick Cave quoted the lines "And the waves, the waves were soldiers moving" in his song "We Call Upon the Author". They come from Steven's poem "Dry Loaf".

Publications[]

Harmonium

Poetry[]

  • Harmonium . New York: Knopf, 1923.
    • revised edition, 1931.
  • Ideas of Order. Alcestis Press, 1935.
    • enlarged edition, Knopf, 1936.
  • Owl's Clover. Alcestis Press, 1936.
  • The Man with the Blue Guitar, and other poems. New York: Knopf, 1942.
  • Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Cummington Press, 1942.
  • Esthetique du Mal. Cummington Press, 1945.
  • Transport to Summer. (includes "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," and "Esthetique du Mal"). New York: Knopf, 1947.
  • A Primitive Like an Orb. Gotham Book Mart, 1948.
  • The Auroras of Autumn. New York: Knopf, 1950.
  • Selected Poems. Fortune Press, 1952.
  • Selected Poems. Lomdon: Faber, 1953.
  • Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1954, 1982.
  • Opus Posthumous. (edited by Samuel French Morse). New York: Knopf, 1957; New York: Random House, 1982.
  • Poems by Wallace Stevens (edited by Samuel French Morse). New York: Vintage Books, 1959.
  • The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected poems and a play (edited by daughter, Holly Stevens). New York: Knopf, 1971.
  • Selected Poems (edited by John N. Serio). New York: Knopf, 2009.[49]

Non-fiction[]

  • Three Academic Pieces: The realm of resemblance, Someone puts a pineapple together, Of ideal time and choice. Cummington Press, 1947.
  • The Relations between Poetry and Painting (lecture). Museum of Modern Art, 1951.
  • Raoul Duly: A note. Pierre Beres, 1953.
  • The Necessary Angel: Essays on reality and the imagination (includes "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," "Effects of Analogy," "The Realm of Resemblance," "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together," and "Of Ideal Time and Choice" from Three Academic Pieces). London: Faber, 1960.

Collected editions[]

  • Collected Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1997.

Letters and journals[]

  • Letters of Wallace Stevens (edited by Holly Stevens). New York: Knopf, 1966.
  • Secretaries of the Moon: The letters of Wallace Stevens and Jose Rodriguez Feo, (edited by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis). 1986.
  • Sur plusieurs beaux sujects: Wallace Stevens's commonplace book (edited by Milton J. Bates) (1989)
  • The Contemplated Spouse: The letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie, edited by D.J. Bluont (2006)


Except where noted, bibliographic information courtesy The Poetry Foundation.[50]

The_Snow_Man

The Snow Man

Wallace_Stevens_-_Vacancy_in_the_park

Wallace Stevens - Vacancy in the park

Wallace_Stevens_-_The_Idea_of_Order_at_Key_West

Wallace Stevens - The Idea of Order at Key West

Poems by Wallace Stevens[]

  1. Anecdote of Canna
  2. Anecdote of the Jar
  3. Anecdote of Men by the Thousands
  4. Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
  5. Banal Sojourn
  6. The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws
  7. Colloquy with a Polish Aunt
  8. The Cuban Doctor
  9. The Curtains in the House of the Metaphysician
  10. The Emperor of Ice-Cream
  11. Fabliau of Florida
  12. Gubbinal
  13. A HIgh-Toned Old Christian Woman
  14. Homunculus et la Belle Etoile
  15. Peter Quince at the Clavier
  16. The Place of the Solitaires
  17. Ploughing on Sunday
  18. The Snow Man
  19. Stars at Tallapoosa
  20. Sunday Morning
  21. The Weeping Burgher

See also[]



References[]

Wallace_Stevens_reads_So_&_So_Reclining_on_Her_Couch

Wallace Stevens reads So & So Reclining on Her Couch

Wallace_Stevens_-_The_Poem_that_Took_the_Place_of_a_Mountain

Wallace Stevens - The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain

Wallace_Stevens_reads_Final_Soliloquy_Of_The_Interior_Paramour

Wallace Stevens reads Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour

"The_Emperor_of_Ice-Cream"_by_Wallace_Stevens_(read_by_Tom_O'Bedlam)

"The Emperor of Ice-Cream" by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

  • Baird, James. The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1968)
  • Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (1985)
  • Beckett, Lucy. Wallace Stevens (1974)
  • Beehler, Michael. T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference (1987)
  • Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination (1972)
  • Berger, Charles. Forms of Farewell: The Late Poetry of Wallace Stevens (1985)
  • Bevis, William W. Mind of Winter: Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature (1988)
  • Blessing, Richard Allen. Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium" (1970)
  • Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (1980)
  • Borroff, Marie, ed. Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical Essays (1963)
  • Brazeau, Peter. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (1983)
  • Brogan, Jacqueline V. The Violence Within/The Violence Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics (2003)
  • Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens (2005)
  • Carroll, Joseph. Wallace Stevens' Supreme Fiction: A New Romanticism (1987)
  • Doggett, Frank. Stevens' Poetry of Thought (1966)
  • Kermode, Frank. Wallace Stevens (1960)
  • Grey, Thomas. The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry Harvard University Press (1991)
  • Hockney, David. The Blue Guitar (1977)
  • Leggett, B.J. Early Stevens: The Nietzschean intertext (1992)
  • Leonard, J.S. & Wharton, C.E. The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality (1988)
  • Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991)
  • McCann, Janet. Wallace Stevens Revisited: The Celestial Possible (1996)
  • Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems Harvard University Press, 1969.
  • Vendler, Helen. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire Harvard University Press (1986)

Notes[]

  1. The Contemplated Spouse: The letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie Kachel (edited by J. Donald Blount), University of South Carolina Press, 2006. Print.
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 Vendler, Helen (August 23, 2009). "The Plain Sense of Things". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Vendler-t.html?_r=1. 
  3. Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Later Years, 1923-1955, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988, p. 22.
  4. Richardson, Joan. Wallace Stevens: The Early Years, 1879-1923, New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986, p. 276.
  5. Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 424.
  6. Richardson, The Early Years, supra, p. 445
  7. Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 87.
  8. Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 423.
  9. Letters of Wallace Stevens, selected and edited by Holly Stevens
  10. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: "O Florida, Venereal Soil," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Farewell to Florida"
  11. The Trouble with Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, an April 14, 2009 article from the website of the Key West Literary Seminar
  12. Hemingway Knocked Wallace Stevens into a Puddle and Bragged About It, a March 20, 2008 article from the website of the Key West Literary Seminar
  13. Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker
  14. Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini
  15. Maria J. Cirurgião, "Last Farewell and First Fruits: The Story of a Modern Poet." Lay Witness (June 2000).
  16. Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, New York, Random House, 1983, p. 295
  17. "Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry and Drama: Wallace Stevens: Biography". Longman. 2005. http://wps.ablongman.com/long_kennedy_lfpd_9/22/5820/1490014.cw/index.html. 
  18. Leonard, John (1970-07-27). "Books of The Times". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/12/21/home/stevens-biography.html?_r=1. ,
  19. Moore, Harry T. (1963). Preface to Wallace Stevens: Images and Judgments. Southern Illinois University Press. p. xi. http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=59685340. 
  20. Wallace Stevens (search results), Poetry Magazine.
  21. 21.0 21.1 21.2 "Old New Haven", Juliet Lapidos, The Advocate, March 17, 2005
  22. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose, New York: Library of America, 1997 (Kermode, F., & Richardson, J., eds.), p. 306.
  23. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 106.
  24. Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous, London: Faber and Faber, 1990 (Milton J. Bates, ed.), p. 185.
  25. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 41.
  26. Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination,Random House USA Paperbacks (Feb 1965) ISBN 978-0-394-70278-0
  27. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 61.
  28. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p.106
  29. Stevens, The Necessary Angel, supra., p. 6.
  30. Brazeal, Gregory (Fall 2007). "The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?". Journal of Modern Literature 31 (1): 80. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738590. Retrieved January 17, 2011. 
  31. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 47.
  32. Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens." Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers, p. 226. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.
  33. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 423.
  34. 34.0 34.1 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 444.
  35. Southworth, James G. Some Modern American Poets, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1950, p. 92.
  36. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 136-37.
  37. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 330-31.
  38. Miller, supra., p. 221
  39. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 343.
  40. 40.0 40.1 Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 310.
  41. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 301.
  42. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 404.
  43. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 218.
  44. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, supra, p. 218-19.
  45. "Wallace Stevens: Biography and Recollections by Acquaintances," Modern American Poetry.
  46. Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 378.
  47. Richardson, The Later Years, supra, p. 420.
  48. 1955 Pulitzer Prizes, Pulitzer, Prizes. Web, Jan. 9, 2018.
  49. Excerpt: 'Selected Poems', a December 3, 2009 NPR article on Stevens
  50. Bibliography, "Wallace Stevens," Poetry Foundation, Web, May 29, 2011.

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