Background
Wallace was born on October 2, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a lawyer, and Margaretha Catharine Zeller.
( The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is the definitiv...)
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet.” Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday, the book was rushed into print for the occasion and contained scores of errors. These have now been corrected in one place for the first time by Stevens scholars John N. Serio and Christopher Beyers, based on original editions and manuscripts. The Collected Poems is the one volume that Stevens intended to contain all the poems he wished to preserve, presented in the way he wanted. An essential collection for all readers of poetry, it is an enduring monument to his dazzling achievement.
https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Poems-Corrected-Vintage-International/dp/1101911689?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1101911689
(This selection of works by Wallace Stevens--the man Harol...)
This selection of works by Wallace Stevens--the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet”--was first published in 1967. Edited by the poet's daughter Holly Stevens, it contains all the major long poems and sequences, and every shorter poem of lasting value in Stevens' career, including some not printed in his earlier Collected Works. Included also is a short play by Stevens, "Bowl, Cat and Broomstick."
https://www.amazon.com/Palm-End-Mind-Selected-Poems/dp/0679724451?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0679724451
(The first new selection of this acclaimed poet’s work in ...)
The first new selection of this acclaimed poet’s work in nearly twenty years—now in paperback—is a rich reminder to poetry readers of his lasting contribution and his unending ability to puzzle, fascinate, and delight us.
https://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Wallace-Stevens/dp/0375711732?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0375711732
(In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Ste...)
In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Stevens reflects upon his art. His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing "poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words." Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination.
https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-Angel-Essays-Reality-Imagination/dp/0394702786?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0394702786
(What country makes the best chocolate? Most people would ...)
What country makes the best chocolate? Most people would answer "Switzerland," or, if they're discerning, "Belgium" or "France." But, how many cocoa trees grow in Zurich? Lyon? Antwerp? Shouldn't the country known for growing the best cocoa beans be the one that makes the best chocolate? So, captivated by theories of international trade but with precious little knowledge of cocoa or chocolate, Steven Wallace set out to build the Omanhene Cocoa Bean Company in Ghana—a country renowned for its cocoa and where Wallace spent part of his youth—in a quest to produce the world's first export-ready, single-origin chocolate bar. What followed would be the true story of an obroni—white person—from Wisconsin taking on the ultimate entrepreneurial challenge. Written with sensitivity and devastating self-awareness, Obroni and the Chocolate Factory is Steven's chaotic, fascinating, and bemusing journey to create a successful international business that aspired to do a bit of good in the world. This book is at once a penetrating business memoir and a story about imagining globalism done right. Wallace's picaresque journey takes him to Ghana's residence for the head of state, to the Amsterdam offices of a secretive international cocoa conglomerate, and face-to-face with key figures in the sharp-elbowed world of global trade and geopolitics. Along the way he'll be forced to deal with bureaucratic roadblocks, a legacy of colonialism, corporate intrigue, inscrutable international politics, a Bond-esque villain nemesis, and constant uncertainty about whether he'll actually pull it off. This rollicking love letter to both Ghana and the world of business is a rare glimpse into the mind of an unusually literate and articulate entrepreneur.
https://www.amazon.com/Obroni-Chocolate-Factory-Unlikely-Globalization/dp/151072365X?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=151072365X
(These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions ...)
These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions are popular for their compact size and reasonable price which do not compromise content. Poems: Stevens contains a selection, chosen by Helen Vendler, of over sixty of Stevens's poems, revealing with renewed force his status as our supreme acrobat of the imagination.
https://www.amazon.com/Stevens-Poems-Everymans-Library-Pocket/dp/0679429115?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0679429115
( Long unavailable, now in paperback for the first time, ...)
Long unavailable, now in paperback for the first time, these are the brilliant, subtle, illuminating letters of one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Stevens's famous criterion for poetry—"It should give pleasure"—informed his epistolary aesthetic as well; these letters stimulate one's appetite for poetry as they valorize the imagination and the senses. They also offer fascinating glimpses of Stevens as family man, insurance executive, connoisseur, and friend. FROM THE BOOK:"Next to the passion flower I love fuchsias, and no kidding. . . . Down among the Pennsylvania Germans there was a race of young men . . . who carved willow fans. These men would take a bit of willow stick about a foot long, peel it and with nothing more than a jackknife carve it into something that looked like a souvenir of Queen Anne's lingerie. The trouble that someone took to invent fuchsias makes me think of these willow fans. However it is a dark and dreary day today and who am I to be frivolous under such circumstances."—from a letter to Wilson Taylor, August 20, 1947
https://www.amazon.com/Letters-Wallace-Stevens/dp/0520206681?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0520206681
(Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry ...)
Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry list - starting in Spring 2001 and continuing, with publication dates each month, for the rest of the year. This will involve a new jacket design recalling the typographic virtues of the classic Faber poetry covers, connecting the backlist and the new titles within a single embracing cover solution. A major reissue program is scheduled, to include classic individual collections from each decade, some of which have long been unavailable: Wallace Stevens's Harmonium and Ezra Pound's Personae from the 1920s; W.H. Auden's Poems (1930); Robert Lowell's Life Studies from the 1950s; John Berryman's 77 Dream Songs and Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings from the 1960s; Ted Hughes's Gaudete and Seamus Heaney's Field Work from the 1970s; Michael Hofmann's Acrimony and Douglas Dunn's Elegies from the 1980s. Timed to celebrate publication of Seamus Heaney's new collection, Electric Light, the relaunch is intended to re-emphasize the predominance of Faber Poetry, and to celebrate a series which has played a shaping role in the history of modern poetry since its inception in the 1920s.
https://www.amazon.com/Harmonium-Wallace-Stevens/dp/0571207790?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0571207790
Wallace was born on October 2, 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, United States, the son of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a lawyer, and Margaretha Catharine Zeller.
After graduating from Boys' High School in Reading, Stevens entered Harvard College in 1897 as a special student, intent on a literary career. He was a regular contributor to the Harvard Advocate in his sophomore year; in the spring of 1899 he was elected to its literary board; and in March 1900 he was named president. But his most cherished undergraduate triumph was having written a sonnet that won the attention of George Santayana and inspired both conversations with the philosopher-poet and a sonnet "in reply. "
By the time Stevens left Harvard in June 1900, he felt himself ready to follow in the footsteps of Richard Harding Davis and Stephen Crane, whose glamorous careers seemed to epitomize the successful "literary life. "
After some months as a reporter on the New York Tribune, which dispelled any illusions about his abilities as a newspaperman, he accepted his father's advice and enrolled at the New York Law School.
He received the LL. B. in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904. During the next few years, while practicing law, Stevens confined his literary ambitions to his journal and his letters to Elsie Viola Kachel, whom he had met on a visit to Reading in 1904. The New York Public Library provided much of his reading matter; and he spent much time in solitary introspection. The most striking entries in Stevens' journal and letters grew out of the long Sunday walks, that provided the satisfactions found in nature, as well as release from recurrent depression.
He had, in any case, realized by 1907 that "It is chiefly in dingy attics that one dreams of violet cities"; but his growing sense that he had "lost a world" when he left Reading did not come to an end until he joined the legal staff of the American Bonding Company in 1908. His new position gave him security and enabled him to marry.
His success can be measured by the fact that many of his business associates did not know that he was a poet until he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1949.
His first significant work to appear in print was a sequence of four ironic lyrics in the "War Number" of Poetry (October 1914).
Stevens told editor Harriet Monroe that he sent to Poetry what he liked best; but some of his most famous poems, including "Peter Quince at the Clavier" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, " appeared in Others. By 1922 he was also, at the age of forty-one, the only significant "new" poet who had not published a book.
Stevens became associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company early in 1916 and moved to Connecticut a few months later. His work, largely in claims, required a great deal of traveling throughout the eastern states. He saw Harriet Monroe whenever he was in Chicago and stayed in touch with his friends in New York but kept his distance from any literary clique.
He had recently finished a quasi-autobiographical long poem, "The Comedian as the Letter C, " which could provide the center for a book; and he had more than 100 published poems from which to select.
Once arrangements were concluded, Stevens found it relatively easy to devote himself to business and to the routine that he and Elsie had established, including winter vacations in Florida, spent with business friends.
His poems henceforth would be of the North. Owl's Clover (1936), conceived as an answer to those critics who disputed his defense of "pure poetry, " was Stevens' least satisfying book. In The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937), however, he recovered his poetic balance; and this examination of "the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined" remains one of his most convincing longer poems.
Election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1945, invitations to read and lecture, honorary degrees, and requests for new poems pleased Stevens, although he clung tenaciously to his privacy. His work was already the subject of considerable scholarly discussion by 1950, for it admirably suited the techniques of New Criticism.
For several years Stevens resisted Knopf's request for a collected edition of the poems, but the approach of his seventy-fifth birthday left him without a further excuse. Collected Poems (which he wanted to call The Whole of Harmonium) appeared on October 1, 1954. Almost no one dissented from the view that it was a superb book.
In November 1954, he was invited to be Charles Eliot Norton professor at Harvard for 1955-1956, an honor he declined because it would mean leaving his job at Hartford Accident and Indemnity.
After receiving a second National Book Award, he finished a few poems, the introduction to Paul Valery's Dialogues, and perhaps the script of "Connecticut, " written for the Voice of America, before he went to the hospital in April - "for about three weeks, " he told a friend. News that he had won the Pulitzer Prize reached him in the hospital.
He recovered sufficiently to go to Yale to receive an honorary degree and to return to his office a few hours each day. But his condition worsened rapidly and he died in August in Hartford.
(The first new selection of this acclaimed poet’s work in ...)
(Faber are pleased to announce the relaunch of the poetry ...)
( Long unavailable, now in paperback for the first time, ...)
(This selection of works by Wallace Stevens--the man Harol...)
( The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens is the definitiv...)
(These Everyman's Library Pocket Poets hardcover editions ...)
(What country makes the best chocolate? Most people would ...)
(In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Ste...)
Quotations:
Stevens observed, "Poetry is a form of melancholia"; but he also said, "To give a sense of the freshness or vividness of life is a valid purpose for poetry. "
"While poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused. If all this is true, then it may be that in a few weeks my imagination will be such a furnace that I can stroll home from the office and fill the house with the most iridescent notes while I am brushing my hair. "
"I have no life except in poetry. No doubt that would be true if my whole life was free for poetry. "
Quotes from others about the person
His contemporary, Harriet Monroe, termed Stevens "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to Him".
Helen Vendler: "Stevens saw in the paintings of both Paul Klee - who was his favorite painter - and Cézanne the kind of work he wanted to do himself as a Modernist poet. Klee had imagined symbols. Klee is not a directly realistic painter and is full of whimsical and fanciful and imaginative and humorous projections of reality in his paintings. The paintings are often enigmatic or full of riddles, and Stevens liked that as well. What Stevens liked in Cézanne was the reduction, you might say, of the world to a few monumental objects. "
He married Elsie Kachel on September 21, 1909. From the first, however, Elsie disliked New York and disapproved of her husband's friends. She spent the summers in the Pennsylvania countryside or in Reading; he consolidated his position with his business associates and, in his free time, thought a good deal about poetry. His letters to her suggest that their relationship was amiable rather than warm and marked by mutual interests.