29 Facts About Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Wallace Stevens won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 into a Lutheran family in the line of John Zeller, his maternal great-grandfather, who settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee.

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Wallace Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree three-year special student from 1897 to 1900.

In one of his early journals, Wallace Stevens gave an account of spending an evening with Santayana in early 1900 and sympathizing with Santayana about a poor review published at that time of Interpretations.

Wallace Stevens then attended New York Law School, graduating with a law degree in 1903, following the example of his two other brothers with law degrees.

Wallace Stevens was baptized Episcopalian and later posthumously edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

In later years, Elsie Wallace Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the couple remained married.

Wallace Stevens would instruct the outside lawyer through a letter reviewing the facts of the case and setting out the company's substantive legal position; he would then step out of the case, delegating all decisions on procedure and litigation strategy.

Wallace Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, between 1922 and 1940, usually staying at the Casa Marina hotel on the Atlantic Ocean.

Wallace Stevens first visited in January 1922, while on a business trip.

In February 1935, Wallace Stevens encountered the poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina.

Wallace Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway.

Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace Stevens, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

On March 28,1955, Wallace Stevens went to see Dr James Moher for accumulating detriments to his health.

Wallace Stevens's wife insisted on trying to attend to him as he recovered but she had suffered a stroke in the previous winter and was not able to assist as she had hoped.

Wallace Stevens debated questions of theodicy during his final weeks with Fr.

Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Wallace Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer and was eventually converted to Catholicism in April 1955 by Hanley.

The obituary for Wallace Stevens that appeared in Poetry magazine was assigned to William Carlos Williams, who felt it suitable and justified to compare Wallace Stevens's poetry to Dante's Vita Nuova and Milton's Paradise Lost.

The initial reception of Wallace Stevens's poetry followed the publication of his first collection of poems, Harmonium, in the early 1920s.

Vendler's two books on Wallace Stevens's poetry distinguished his short poems and his long poems and suggested that they be considered under separate forms of literary interpretation and critique.

Interest in the reading and reception of Wallace Stevens's poetry continues into the early 21st century with a full volume dedicated in the Library of America to his collected writings and poetry.

The reception and interpretation of Wallace Stevens's poetry have been widespread and of diverse orientation.

Wallace Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached 40 years of age.

The paintings are often enigmatic or full of riddles, and Wallace Stevens liked that as well.

Wallace Stevens received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn and in 1955 for Collected Poems.

Wallace 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 frontispiece mentions Hockney's dual inspiration as "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso".

Wallace Stevens was honored with a US postage stamp in 2012.