Wallace Stevens

Based on Wikipedia: Wallace Stevens

The Insurance Executive Who Wrote American Poetry's Most Beautiful Lines

Wallace Stevens punched Ernest Hemingway in the face and broke his own hand doing it.

This happened in Key West in 1936, at a party where the two literary giants met. Stevens swung at the younger, faster Hemingway, who proceeded to knock the poet down "spectacularly" into a puddle of rainwater. Stevens later apologized. But the image is irresistible: a fifty-six-year-old insurance company vice president, already corpulent at six feet two inches and two hundred forty pounds, throwing punches at the most celebrated tough-guy writer of the twentieth century.

The fight captures something essential about Wallace Stevens. Here was a man who lived two lives so completely separate that many of his colleagues at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company had no idea he wrote poetry at all—let alone that he would win the Pulitzer Prize for it. By day, he evaluated surety claims and wrote letters instructing lawyers on procedural matters. By night and on weekends, he composed some of the most luminous, philosophically dense verse in the English language.

A Lutheran Boy from Pennsylvania

Stevens came into the world in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. His family was Lutheran, descended from Dutch and German settlers—his maternal great-grandfather had fled to the Susquehanna Valley as a religious refugee in 1709. His father was a prosperous lawyer who expected his sons to follow him into respectable professions.

Young Wallace attended Harvard as what they called a "special student"—enrolled for three years but not pursuing a formal degree. This was not unusual for the era, when many young men from good families used Harvard as a kind of finishing school rather than a credential-granting institution. Stevens thrived there. He became president of The Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and met the philosopher George Santayana.

That meeting would shape his entire intellectual life.

Santayana was a Spanish-born philosopher who taught at Harvard and wrote with unusual elegance about aesthetics, religion, and the nature of beauty. His book "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion" argued that poetry and religious belief shared a common source: the human imagination's need to create meaning in a universe that offers none inherently. Stevens spent an evening with Santayana in early 1900, sympathizing with the philosopher about a harsh review the book had received. Decades later, Stevens would still be working through Santayana's ideas in his poems.

The Long Courtship and the Difficult Marriage

After Harvard, Stevens moved to New York City and tried journalism briefly before enrolling in New York Law School, following his brothers into the legal profession. He graduated in 1903 and began working at various law firms.

Then, in 1904, on a trip back to Reading, he met Elsie Viola Kachel.

Elsie was everything Stevens's family didn't want for him. She had worked as a saleswoman, a milliner (someone who makes hats), and a stenographer. She came from a lower social class. She hadn't received much formal education. Stevens's parents objected strenuously to the match.

He married her anyway, in 1909. Not a single member of his family attended the wedding. Stevens never spoke to his parents again during his father's lifetime.

The marriage began romantically enough. In 1913, the couple rented a New York apartment from the sculptor Adolph Weinman, who was so taken with Elsie's striking profile that he made a bust of her. Art historians believe her face may have served as the model for two of America's most iconic coins: the Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty half dollar. If this is true, then for decades Americans carried Elsie Stevens's profile in their pockets without knowing it.

But the marriage soured. By the mid-1930s, Wallace and Elsie were living as strangers in the same house. They no longer shared a bedroom. Stevens moved into the master bedroom on the second floor, with an attached study where he could work. They were separated by nearly a decade in age, by different interests, and eventually by Elsie's deteriorating mental health. Yet they never divorced.

In 1924, their daughter Holly was born. She would later become the custodian of her father's literary legacy, editing his letters and a collection of his poems after his death.

The Business of Insurance

Stevens's day job might seem incompatible with his artistic temperament, but he was remarkably good at it. He joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916 and stayed there for the rest of his life. By 1934, he had risen to vice president.

His work involved evaluating surety insurance claims—essentially deciding whether the company should pay out when someone claimed a loss. When a claim was rejected and a lawsuit followed, Stevens would hire local lawyers and send them detailed letters explaining the company's legal position. Then he would step back and let them handle the courtroom tactics. It was methodical, analytical work that suited his precise mind.

By the mid-1930s, at the height of the Great Depression, Stevens was earning twenty thousand dollars a year—equivalent to roughly three hundred fifty thousand dollars today. While millions of Americans searched through trash cans for food, the poet-executive lived in comfortable financial security.

When he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, Harvard offered him a faculty position. He turned it down. He would have had to leave his job at the Hartford, and at seventy-five years old, he wasn't about to abandon the career that had sustained him for decades.

Harmonium and the Birth of a Poetic Voice

Stevens published his first collection of poems, "Harmonium," in 1923, when he was already forty-four years old. This late start would become part of his legend—the insurance man who emerged fully formed as a major poet in middle age.

The book contained some of his most enduring work. "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is a meditation on death that refuses to be mournful. "Sunday Morning" reimagines religious faith for a secular age. "The Snow Man" distills Buddhist-like emptiness into fifteen lines. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" presents reality as irreducibly multiple, each perspective revealing something different and none more "true" than the others.

Harriet Monroe, reviewing the book for Poetry magazine, captured its distinctive quality: "The delight which one breathes like a perfume from the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the natural effluence of his own clear and untroubled and humorously philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are."

That phrase—"things as they are"—would become central to understanding Stevens. His entire body of work circles around a single question: In a world without God, without inherent meaning, without any cosmic order waiting to be discovered, how do we make sense of our experience? His answer, developed over decades, was that the imagination creates the meaning that reality lacks. Poetry becomes, in his phrase, "a supreme fiction"—not a lie, but a necessary act of creation.

Key West and Literary Quarrels

Between 1922 and 1940, Stevens made numerous trips to Key West, Florida, usually staying at the Casa Marina hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He fell in love with the place immediately. "The place is a paradise," he wrote to Elsie after his first visit. "Midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen."

Key West shaped many of his poems, including "The Idea of Order at Key West," one of his most celebrated works. The poem describes a woman singing beside the ocean, and it asks: whose order do we perceive in the world—the sea's, the singer's, or our own?

But Key West also brought him into conflict with other writers. Robert Frost was often at the Casa Marina, and the two poets clashed repeatedly. In February 1935, they argued after Stevens had been drinking. In 1940, they argued again, this time trading insults about each other's work:

Stevens: Your poems are too academic.

Frost: Your poems are too executive.

Stevens: The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about subjects.

Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.

Both accusations contained some truth. Frost wrote accessible poems about New England farms and rural life—subjects any reader could recognize. Stevens wrote elaborate philosophical meditations that could seem like decorative objects, beautiful but remote from ordinary experience. Their argument was really about what poetry should do and whom it should serve.

The Hemingway fight happened in 1936, at a party at a mutual acquaintance's home. Stevens was fifty-six; Hemingway was thirty-six and in his physical prime. One account describes Hemingway "weaving like a shark" before landing his punches. Stevens went down into a puddle. He broke his hand on Hemingway's jaw.

Hemingway later called Stevens "the antipoet poet"—meaning a poet so cerebral, so removed from physical reality, that he represented the opposite of everything Hemingway valued in writing. Stevens might have taken this as a compliment.

The Productive Decade

By late February 1947, approaching his sixty-seventh birthday, Stevens had completed the most productive period of his life. In just eleven years, he had published four volumes of poetry: "Ideas of Order," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "Parts of a World," and "Transport to Summer." The last of these received a glowing review in The New York Times.

His poems from this period grew longer and more ambitious. "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" runs to over five hundred lines. It attempts nothing less than a theory of poetry itself, arguing that poetry must be abstract, must change, and must give pleasure. "The Auroras of Autumn" meditates on death and time through the image of the northern lights.

Many of his poems are explicitly about the act of making art. "The Man with the Blue Guitar" takes its title from a Picasso painting and explores how art transforms reality. "Of Modern Poetry" defines what poems must do in an age that has lost its old certainties: "It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place."

In 1950, Stevens learned that Santayana—the philosopher who had shaped his thinking half a century earlier—had retired to a nursing home in Rome. Stevens composed "To an Old Philosopher in Rome," a tribute to his intellectual mentor:

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, the pillowed porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room.

The poem transforms a humble death scene into something magnificent. A bed becomes "the immensest theatre." The ordinary becomes sacred through attention and language. This was Stevens's central belief: that the imagination does not falsify reality but reveals its hidden grandeur.

The Final Months

In March 1955, Stevens's health began to fail. He saw his doctor about various complaints, but initial examinations found nothing definitive. In April, a gastrointestinal series revealed diverticulitis, a gallstone, and severe stomach bloating. He was admitted to St. Francis Hospital in Hartford and underwent surgery on April 26.

The surgeons found stomach cancer in the lower region, near the large intestine, blocking normal digestion. In the 1950s, this was essentially a death sentence. The doctors told his daughter Holly but kept the truth from Stevens himself—a common practice at the time.

Stevens was released on May 11 and returned home to recuperate. His wife Elsie tried to care for him, but she had suffered a stroke the previous winter and could offer little help. By May 20, Stevens had entered the Avery Convalescent Hospital.

Despite his deteriorating condition, Stevens maintained his dignity and his commitments. In early June, he attended a ceremony at the University of Hartford to receive an honorary doctorate. On June 13, he traveled to New Haven to collect another honorary degree from Yale. On June 20, he went home and insisted on working limited hours.

On July 21, he was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital. On August 1, though bedridden, he revived enough to speak some parting words to his daughter before falling asleep. He died the next morning, August 2, 1955. He was seventy-five years old.

The Contested Conversion

Stevens's final weeks included something unexpected: conversations about God.

Friends knew that throughout his years of visiting New York City, Stevens had been in the habit of stopping at St. Patrick's Cathedral for meditative purposes. During his last days at St. Francis Hospital, he debated questions of theodicy—the problem of evil, the justification of God's ways—with Father Arthur Hanley, the hospital chaplain.

According to Hanley, Stevens converted to Catholicism in April 1955 and received communion. A nun present at the time confirmed this account.

Stevens's daughter Holly disputed this version of events. She was not present at the purported conversion and found it inconsistent with everything she knew about her father. The controversy has never been resolved.

What makes the question so compelling is that Stevens's entire body of work grapples with the loss of religious faith. His poems propose poetry itself as a replacement for religion—a "supreme fiction" that can give meaning to existence without requiring belief in the supernatural. If Stevens converted on his deathbed, it would suggest that poetry had failed him at the end. If he didn't, it would confirm his lifelong commitment to finding meaning through art alone.

Perhaps the truth is more complicated than either side allows. A man can hold contradictory beliefs. A poet who spent his life arguing that we must create our own meaning might still, in his final hours, reach for something older and simpler.

The Afterlife of a Poet

William Carlos Williams wrote Stevens's obituary for Poetry magazine. Williams—himself a doctor who wrote poems between seeing patients—compared Stevens's work to Dante's "Vita Nuova" and Milton's "Paradise Lost." It was high praise from a fellow poet who had taken a very different path.

Stevens had left one ambition unfulfilled: he had wanted to rewrite Dante's "Divine Comedy" for "those who live in the world of Darwin and not the world of Plato." He wanted to create a modern epic that acknowledged evolution and rejected idealism, that built a vision of meaning from purely material foundations. He never finished it.

The scholarly appreciation of Stevens's work exploded after his death. Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom, two of the most influential literary critics of the late twentieth century, both wrote extensively about his poems. Vendler argued that his short poems and long poems required different interpretive approaches. Bloom placed him at the center of the American poetic tradition.

Today, Stevens occupies an unusual position in American literature. He is not as widely read as Frost, whose accessible poems about rural life continue to resonate with general audiences. He is not as culturally visible as Hemingway, whose image as the hard-drinking adventurer-writer has taken on mythic proportions. But among readers of poetry, Stevens is revered. His "Collected Poems" sits in the Library of America, the standard repository of classic American literature. His phrases—"the palm at the end of the mind," "the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"—have entered the language of people who care about language.

The Imagination's Necessity

What Stevens offered was a way of thinking about meaning that remains relevant in a secular age. He took seriously the idea that there is no inherent order in the universe, no God arranging things for our benefit, no Platonic forms waiting to be discovered. He found this liberating rather than terrifying.

If there is no given meaning, then we are free to create our own. The imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of engaging with it more fully. Poetry does not describe a pre-existing world; it brings new worlds into being.

This is what he meant by "the supreme fiction"—not a comfortable lie, but a creative act that makes life livable. We all live by fictions, Stevens argued. The question is whether we create them consciously, with full awareness of what we're doing, or whether we simply inherit them from our culture without examination.

The insurance executive who punched Hemingway, who never spoke to his parents again after marrying beneath his station, who lived a double life as businessman and poet, who may or may not have converted to Catholicism on his deathbed—this complicated man left behind poems of extraordinary beauty and philosophical depth. They continue to speak to readers who, like Stevens, find themselves trying to make meaning in a world that offers no easy answers.

"The poem refreshes life," Stevens wrote, "so that we share, for a moment, the first idea." That first idea—the original encounter with reality before habit dulls it, before categories contain it—is what his poems pursue. Reading him, we see the world made new.