POETRY: Collected Works of Wallace Stevens

Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens

He argued with Robert Frost and he broke his hand assaulting Ernest Hemingway at a party. Who? __Wallace Stevens the quintessential American poet. By trade Stevens was an insurance man and most of his poetry was written later in life. Stevens definitely made people uncomfortable. Late in life he converted to Catholicism and told Chuck Colson to keep his conversion quiet that, "converting to Catholicism for a Hartford patrician was like becoming 'honorary shanty Irish.' That was simply not done. It could get him thrown out of the country club." Despite Steven's rough edges, his poetry was superb__ deeply meditative and philosophical. He believed that reality was the product of a person's imagination and with their imagination a person could find different ways at any given moment to perceive the world. This ability to perceive the world form different angles is what is reflected in his poetry and prose. Steven's believed that the best we could hope for was a "well conceived fiction" of reality that would only last for a moment__writing "if we place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose and order on the landscape." The paradox of Steven's philosophy of "subjective reality" flies in the face of his deathbed conversion to Catholicism which certainly teaches an "objective reality." It's interesting to speculate__ that if given more time to live would Stevens had disavowed his earlier writing that was based on a subjective view of reality. For anyone wanting to explore Steven's poetry, "The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens," (Vintage Press), is an good representative collection. There are many others published and his poetry is readily available on the Internet. To Steven's poetry was, "the poem of the mind in the act of finding."