Wallace Stevens Poetry Pdf
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Wallace stevens poetry pdf Continue American poet Wallace StevensThivens in 1948 Bourne (1879-10-02)October 2, 1879Read, Pennsylvania, USA DiedAugust 2, 1955 (1955-08-02) (age 75)Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.OccupationPoet, Lawyer, Insurance ExecutivePeriod1914-1955Leat MovementConsy MovementConsying WorksHarmony Idea of Order on Ki WestMan with Blue GuitarAura AutumnModern PoetrySobert Frost Medal (1951)SpouseElsie Viola Cachel (m. 1909 -1955)ChildrenGolly Stevens (1924-1992)The signature of Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was educated at Harvard and then new York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive director at an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1955, he received the Pulitzer Prize for poems for collected poetry. Stevens' first writing period begins with his publication in 1923 of harmonium, followed by a somewhat revised and amended second edition in 1930. His second period occurred at eleven years old just before the publication of his Transport to the summer, when Stevens wrote three volumes of poems, including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, along with Transport to Summer. His third and final period of writing was the publication of Aurora Autumn in the early 1950s, and his Collected Poems was published in 1954, the year before his death. Among his most famous poems are The Aurora of Autumn, Anecdote Jara, Disappointment Ten Hours, Emperor Ice Cream, The Idea of Order on Key West, Sunday Morning, Snowman and Thirteen Ways to Look at a Black Bird. In 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was born into a Lutheran family in the family of John Seller, his maternal great-grandfather, who settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee. Educated and married the son of a successful lawyer, Stevens studied at Harvard as a failed three-year special student from 1897 to 1900. According to his biographer, Milton Bates, Stevens was personally introduced to the philosopher George Santayan while living in Boston, and was heavily influenced by the book Santayana's Interpretation of Poetry and Religion (1900). Holly Stevens, his daughter, recalled her father Santayan's long devotion when she posthumously reprinted her father's collected letters in 1977 for Knopf. In one of his early diaries, Stevens described how he spent an evening with Santaina in the early 1900s and sympathized with Santayan's poor review, which was published at the time regarding Santayana's book Interpretation. After Harvard, Stevens moved to New York and worked as a journalist for a time. He then attended New York Law School, graduating law education in 1903, following the example of two other brothers with a law degree. During a trip to Reading in 1904, Stevens met Elsie Viola Kahel (1886-1963, also known as Elsie Mall), a young woman who worked as a saleswoman, miller and stenographer. After much courtship, he married her in 1909 because of the objections of his parents, who considered her ill-educated and lower-class. As The New York Times reported in 2009, none of his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never visited or spoken to his parents during his father's life. Daughter Holly was born in 1924. She was baptized by the Episcopal, and then posthumously edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. Stevens' wife, Elsie, may have been a model for the National Walking Liberty for half a dollar when the couple lived in New York in 1913, Stevens rented a New York apartment from sculptor Adolf A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile may have been used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury Penny and Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years, Elsie Stevens began to show symptoms of mental illness, as a result of which the marriage fell apart, but the couple remained married. In his biography of Stevens, Paul Mariani says that the couple was largely estranged, separated by almost a full decade at the age, although lived in the same house by the mid-1930s, stating: ... there were signs of a household fracture to consider. From the start, Stevens, who had not shared a bedroom with his wife for years, moved into the bedroom with his attached study on the second floor. After working for several New York law firms between 1904 and 1907, he was hired in January 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914, he was vice president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company in St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was laid off after the merger in 1916, he joined the home office of The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and moved to Hartford, where he remained for the rest of his life. Stevens' residence in Hartford. His career as a businessman-lawyer and poet in his spare time received considerable attention, as summarized in Thomas Gray's book concerning his insurance executive career. Gray summarized part of Stevens' day-to-day responsibilities, which included assessing insurance claims, saying: If Stevens dismissed the claim and the company was sued, he hired a local attorney to defend the case in the place where it would be handled. Stevens would instruct an outside lawyer through a letter examining the circumstances of the case and astonishing the company's substantial legal position; then he'll walk out of the case, delegating all decisions on procedure and litigation In 1917, Stevens and his wife moved to 210 Farmington Avenue, where they remained for the next seven years and where he completed his first book of poetry, Harmony. From 1924 to 1932, he lived at 735 Farmington Avenue. In 1932, he acquired colonial in the 1920s at 118 Westerly Terrace, where he lived the rest of his life. According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive, earning by the mid-1930s $20,000 a year, equivalent to about $350,000 today (2016). And this is at a time (during the Great Depression) when many Americans were out of work, searching through trash cans to produce food. By 1934, he was appointed vice president of the company. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a position as a professor at Harvard, but he refused because it would have required him to relinquish his vice presidency in Hartford. Throughout his life, Stevens was politically conservative and was described by critic William York Tindall as a Republican in the form of Robert A. Taft. Between 1922 and 1940, Stevens traveled to Kee West, Florida, and usually stayed at the Casa Marina hotel in the Atlantic Ocean. He first visited it in January 1922 while on a business trip. The place is paradise, he wrote Elsie, in summer weather, the sky is brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green for what you've ever seen. Kee West's influence on Stevens' poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order. In February 1935, Stevens met the poet Robert Frost at Casa Marina. The two men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens was drunk and behaving inappropriately. According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Stevens often visited representative institutions during the ban with both friends and poets. The following year, Stevens was in an altercation with Ernest Hemingway at a party at The Waddell Avenue house of a mutual friend in Key West. Stevens broke his arm, apparently from a blow to Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked down on Hemingway Street. Stevens later apologized. Paul Mariani, Stevens' biographer, refers to this as, ... right in front of Stevens was a very nemesis to his imagination - an anti-poet poet (Hemingway), a poet of extraordinary reality, as Stevens later called him, who put him in the same category as other anti-trump, William Carlos Williams, except that Hemingway was fifteen years younger and much faster than Williams, and much less friendly. So it began, with Stevens swinging at the bespectacled Hemingway, who seemed to weave like a shark, and Dad hitting his one-two and Stevens going down impressively, as Hemingway would remember him, in a puddle of fresh In 1940, Stevens made his last trip to The West. Frost was at Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued. As paul Mariani's sister in his Stevens life-writing exchange in Key West in February 1940 included the following comments: Stevens: Your poems are too academic. Frost: Your poems are too executive. Stevens: The problem with you, Robert, is that you write about objects. Frost: The problem with you, Wallace, is that you write about Brick-a-bra. By the end of February 1947, when Stevens was about 67 years old, it became apparent that Stevens had completed the most productive ten years of his life in writing poetry. In February 1947, his volume of poems entitled Transport to Summer was published, which was well received by F. O. Mathissen, writing for The New York Times. In the eleven years immediately leading up to its publication, Stevens wrote three volumes of poems, including Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of the World, and Transport for Summer. They were all written before Stevens began writing his well-received poem, Aurora Autumn. In 1950- 1951, when Stevens received the news that Santayana had retired to live in a retirement facility in Rome for the last years, Stevens wrote a poem by the Old Philosopher in Rome in memory of his mentor while a Harvard student: It is a kind of complete greatness at the end, with each visible thing enlarged and still nothing more than a bed , a chair and moving nuns, a huge theater, a pillow porch, a book and a candle in your amber room.