Wallace
Stevens (1879-1955) won two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry, along with the Bollingen Prize and the Frost Medal. He was one of the
American poets who were considered the high priests of literary modernism, along
with T.S. Eliot, William
Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. He
was a presence in poetry for more than four decades and had an enormous impact
on poetry’s substance and direction.
Literary studies
of his poetry abound. Several biographies of Stevens were written in the 1980s
and a few in the 1990s. Twenty years after the last major biography, Paul Mariani has
published The
Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens.
Mariani is
especially well-suited for the task. A poet himself, he has published seven
collections of poetry and numerous non-fiction works. His biographies include William
Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981); Dream
Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); Lost
Puritan: The Life of Robert Lowell (1996); The
Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (1999); and Gerard
Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008).
To continue
reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Top photograph: Wallace Stevens late in
life.
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