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Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens

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American poet (1879–1955)

OverviewAI-generated

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an American poet, journalist, writer, and playwright. Born in Reading and residing in Hartford, he was a member of the Republican Party. Stevens received education from Harvard University and New York Law School. His literary career began in 1914, and he wrote in English. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Stevens was recognized with the Bollingen Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, and the Robert Frost Medal. His archives are held at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, as well as the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He died of stomach cancer in Hartford.

Synthesized by Vinony from 35 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Wikiquote, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person
Gender
Male
Origin
United States
Active from
1879
Active to
1955
alternative rock musicart popchamber folkchamber popcomposerscontemporary folk

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
2,061
Total plays
11,740

Tags

poetryspoken word

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a major American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his adult life working for an insurance company in Connecticut. His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning ," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Wallace+Stevens">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Wallace Stevens

Quotes

  • One ought not to hoard culture. It should be adapted and infused into society as a leaven. Liberality of culture does not mean illiberality of its benefits.
  • A diary is more or less the work of a man of clay whose hands are clumsy and in whose eyes there is no light.
  • Poor, dear, silly Spring, preparing her annual surprise!
  • In European thought in general, as contrasted with American, vigor, life and originality have a kind of easy, professional utterance. American — on the other hand, is expressed in an eager amateurish way. A European gives a sense of scope, of survey, of consideration. An American is strained, sensational. One is artistic gold; the other is bullion.
  • To be young is all there is in the world. The rest is nonsense — and cant. They talk so beautifully about work and having a family and a home (and I do, too, sometimes) — but it's all worry and head-aches and respectable poverty and forced gushing. ... Telling people how nice it is, when, in reality, you would give all of your last thirty years for one of your first thirty. Old people are tremendous frauds.
  • How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

~39 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He 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.

Stevens's first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Wallace Stevens” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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