Poet · Pairing III
Wallace Stevens
1879–1955 · American modernist poet
“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”
Wallace Stevens led one of literature’s great double lives: by day a senior insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, and in private one of the most original American poets of the twentieth century. He published his first collection, Harmonium, in 1923, when he was already in his forties, and wrote much of his greatest work later in life.
Stevens’s poems are famous for their dazzling language, cool intelligence, and deep preoccupation with a single question: how the imagination and reality shape each other. “The Snow Man” is a perfect miniature of that project — a poem about what it would take to see the world stripped of the feelings we habitually project onto it.
Late in his career he received major recognition, including the Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems in 1955, the year of his death.
In this curriculum
Read him in Pairing III — The Natural World →