Thanks for the comment! Stevens is a wonderful poet. Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Email Address. Interesting Literature is a participant in the Amazon EU Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.
Share this: Tweet. Like this: Like Loading Handbasket July 3, at pm. For a few years he studied as a non-degree student at Harvard, where he was invigorated by the literary community. He took a job with an insurance firm, the American Bonding Company, in , a line of work that would be lifelong and ensure his financial stability. Stevens married Elsie Viola Kachel in , to the stern disapproval of his parents, who viewed his wife as lower class. His relationships with his father and mother were strained until their deaths in and , respectively.
During this time, Stevens acquainted himself with the New York literary scene. His first mature poetry was published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry magazine in A defining shift in Stevens' life came in , when he moved to Hartford, Connecticut to a new job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would remain the rest of his life.
The first few years in Connecticut proved a fruitful period, resulting in his groundbreaking debut collection, Harmonium , in The complex, hyper-attentive observations in his poems garnered some immediate praise from fellow poets, but many critics dismissed his work and its tendency to exclude the realm of reality in favor of nuanced mental experiments.
Stevens in fact waited another decade to produce a second book, but this was due mostly to the birth of his daughter, Holly, in He admitted to his companions that he dreaded what awaited him at home.
Mariani gives a fascinating account of a poet, previously unknown to me, who strongly influenced Stevens in those days: Donald Evans, a free spirit with a bejewelled, determinedly decadent poetic style, who most probably committed suicide, in He had shyly used a pseudonym, Peter Parasol, when submitting earlier poems, two of which were accepted. Stevens obeyed. Then, in , perhaps, in part, to secure a suitable life with Elsie, who disliked New York, Stevens took a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he worked for the rest of his life.
For several years after the birth of his only child, Holly, in , Stevens wrote little. But flares of comedy recurred. Pappadopoulos, and thanks. Stevens took to composing poems on slips of paper in the morning while walking to his office, where his secretary typed them up. A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly. His public manner became aloof and stony, but the bravado of his boyhood resurfaced when he drank too much, as he did with zestful abandon on annual, usually solo vacations to the Florida Keys.
At another party in Key West, in , a swaggering Stevens loudly impugned the manhood of Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway showed up, Stevens took a swing at him, and Hemingway knocked him down.
Hemingway then battered him, but later cheerfully accepted his meek apology. They agreed to a cover story: Stevens had been injured falling down stairs. But the Florida sojourns provided Stevens with more than occasions for feckless behavior. The natural elements and the weather set him to wide-awake dreaming on his biggest theme: the capacity of fiction to encompass, and to master, experiences of reality.
And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. At last, the poet names his companion, Ramon Fernandez, by addressing him.
0コメント