Wallace Stevens (born in Reading, in Pennsylvania, on October 2nd 1879; died in Hartford, in the Connecticut, on August 2nd 1955) is a poet, precursor major of modern poetry American. Combining the Poetry with its lawyer trade, it publishes its first book, Harmonium , in 1923. Less recognized from alive sound than of other poets of its generation (such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot), it receives in 1955 the National Book Award for Collected poems and the Prix Pulitzer. The same year, it obtains an honorary title of the university of Yale.

Biography

Wallace Stevens is the second child of the three children of a father lawyer and a mother teacher. Between 1897 and 1900, it follows studies to Harvard of which it will not be graduate. It then begins a short career from journalist to the New York Herald Times then is directed finally worms of the studies of right to the New York School Law in 1903; It is allowed with the Barreau of New York in 1904.

He Marie with Elsie Violated Kachel in 1909 and with which he will have a girl, Holly, born in 1904. In 1916, Stevens moves in Harford and engages in the trades of the insurance, within the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company , as an legal adviser. Exceeding apparent contradiction between business world and poetry (to which his/her father had accustomed it), Stevens will become the vice-president of the company in 1934, until the end of its life. The poetry of Stevens is revealed only tardily, at 35 years: even if it had already published poems of 1898 to 1900, in the Harvard Advocate and the Harvard Monthly it is only in 1914, that under the pseudonym of Peter Parasol, it writes and sends poems, Phases , with the magazine Poetry (poet.org), at the time of a contest on the topic of the war. It does not gain but will be published by the magazine some time later.

Its first collection, Harmonium , are published in 1923, before a long silence until 1935, or it publishes 3 years after a republication enriched by its first collection.

Here a description of the work of Wallace Stevens, such as it perceived it:

The work of the author suggests the possibility of a supreme fiction, recognized like fiction, in which humanity could with oneself offer a filling. In the creation of such a fiction, whatever it is, poetry would be equipped with vital importance. The many poems which refer to the interactions of reality and imagination must be regarded as located in margin of this central theme.