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In his exploratory study of modern American poets, economist David Galenson limited his analysis to 11 outstanding innovators who averaged more than three poems per anthology. Of the 11, six were finders and five were seekers -- experimental poets tending to do their most important work later in their careers. That was the career pattern for all five: Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Each of the five was also known for detailed observations. In the case of Williams, Moore and Bishop, they focused sharply on the world around them. Lowell and Stevens put more emphasis on the relationship between their interior life and their observations. Like many seekers, most of the five struggled to finish poems or frequently revised previously completed works.
Wallace Stevens, 1879-1955: insurance executive and seeker
Both Wallace Stevens was both a poet and a vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity insurance company, who followed the typical path of an experimental innovator, achieving his poetic success gradually in later life.
His five poems in the top 20 were all written between ages 36 and 55. They are:
- “Sunday Morning,” from age 36;
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” from age 38;
- “The Snow Man,” from age 42;
- “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” from age 43; and
- “The Idea of Order at Key West,” from age 55.
Anthologies contain no reprints of poems that Stevens wrote before age 32. As a seeker, Stevens disliked rules in
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Wallace Stevens, imaginative, experimental
middle-aged observer
At age 55, Stevens wrote “The Idea of Order at Key West,” one of the top 20 most frequently reprinted modern American poems. This excerpt from the complex, 56-line poem, about a man’s response to hearing a woman singing in the night, hints at what Stevens called “the real world as seen by an imaginative man.”
The Idea of Order at Key West
…
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
...
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poetry. “The last thing in the world that I should want to do would be to formulate a system,” he wrote.
He also avoided making outlines for his poems in advance. Instead, he would start writing without a plan and improvise as he wrote. Like many other experimental innovators, he re-revised works that already seemed finished.
But his elegant, complex, imaginative poems differ markedly from the works of many other experimental poets who emphasize colloquial language and concrete observations. Almost every poem ever written combines to some degree the life of the imagination with observations of the real world, but for Stevens the relationship between the two was often his theme.
His terrain, Stevens wrote, was “the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined.” Stevens took upon himself a challenge like that of a fellow experimental innovator, painter Paul Cézanne, who sought to depict not just the light and colors of the natural world, but also the geometric forms and patterns it evoked in his mind.
To ward off suggestions that his work was purely imaginative, Stevens emphasized how important observation of the real world was for him. His poems had “actual background,” he said, and were based on real life, including his frequent visits to Florida and Cuba. “The real world seen by an imaginative man may very well seem like an imaginative construction,” he wrote.
At different times, he emphasized the importance of both imagination and observation. In a 1945 letter to a friend, Cuban essayist José Rodríguez Feo, he cited “a precious sentence in Henry James”: “To live in the world of creation – to get into it and stay in it – to frequent it and haunt it – to think intensely and fruitfully – to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation – this is the only thing.”
But in a 1948 letter to Thomas McGreevey, he wrote, “The poet lives only in and for the world of poetry. Nicht wahr?”
Stevens knew he wasn’t a young genius, and as a young man he even described himself in terms appropriate to an aging experimental innovator.
When his wife suggested that he leave a New York City finance position in his early 30s to return to their hometown of Reading, Penn., and start a business, he responded: “I fully intend to continue along my present line—because it gives me a living and because it seems to offer possibilities. I am far from being a genius – and must rely on hard and faithful work.”
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