Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvani
a in 1879. He attended Harvard College for three years, where he began writing poetry and journalism but did not graduate. Stevens then moved to New York, where he earned a law degree from New York Law School in 1903 and was admitted to the bar in 1904. After failing to establish himself in legal practice, he took his first insurance job with the New York office of the American Bonding Co. in 1908. A few job moves later, Stevens relocated to Connecticut and joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he stayed for the rest of his career. His professional specialty was the field of surety bonds, and evidently he was skillful and imaginative at handling difficult claims. In 1934, Stevens was named a vice president at Hartford, making him one of the company’s senior officers.
The other side of Stevens, the poetic side, then began to emerge. He published Ideas of Order in 1935, Owl’s Clover in 1936 and The Man with the Blue Guitar in 1937. His literary reputation grew, and he corresponded with other poets of the time, including Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams. His poetry is difficult and allusive, the sound of the words developing their own echoes. Here is one of his better-known poems, “Peter Quince at the Clavier”:
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the selfsame sounds
On my spirit make music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sounds;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna.
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders watching felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
His poems, like those of T.S.Eliot and Ezra Pound, would be pretentious if they weren’t so beautiful. Why Peter Quince (a character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)? And why the reference to Susanna and the elders, an apocryphal biblical tale, in which Susanna’s beauty so arouses the elders that they attempt to prosecute the innocent woman for adultery? You read Wallace Stevens at your peril.
By the way, it would be a mistake to suppose that he only worked at the Hartford to support his lifestyle and his poetry. He loved his job, and he refused to retire even after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. I fancy that both sides of his brain needed to be exercised, and were informed and inspired by the other side. After his death in 1955, John Berryman wrote: “He lifted up, among the actuaries/ A grandee crow. Ah ha & he crowed good/ That funny money-man.”
