Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Wallace Stevens” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Wallace Stevens 

(1 879 – 1955)

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of Garrett Barcalow Stevens, a prosperous country lawyer. His mother’s family, the Zellers, was of Dutch origin; she taught at school. Stevens attended the Reading Boys’ High School, and en-rolled in 1893 at Harvard College. During this period Stevens began to write for the Harvand Advocate, Trend, and Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry. In his writing aspirations he was encouraged among others by George Santayana. Stevens’s first play, Three Travellers Watch A Sunrise, won that magazine’s prize for verse drama in 1916. It was produced in the following year at New York’s Provincetown Playhouse. After leaving Harvard with-out a degree in 1900, Stevens worked as a reporter for the Nov York Tribune. He then entered New York Law School, graduated in 1903, and was admitted to the bar next year.

Stevens worked as an attorney in several firms and in 1908 se-cured a position with the American Bonding Company. Stevens married Elsie Kachel Moll, a shop girl, from his hometown. The marriage was unhappy but stable. Stevens spent time with avant-garde writers and artist around his Harvard classmate and art collector Walter Arensberg. Influenced by imagism and French symbolism, Stevens wrote Sunday Morning, his famous -break-through work. Stevens published his first collection of verse, Harmonium (1923), at the age of forty-four. “From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion. The volume is a glittering edifice of icicles. Brilliant as the moon, the book is equally dead,” wrote Percy Hutchison in The New York Times (August 9, 1931). Nov the collection is regarded as one of the great works of American poetry. Harmonium included The Emperor of the Ice Cream, one of Stevens’s own favourite poems, Le Monocle de Mon Oncle, The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. The poems are partly autobiographical, also referring to the failure of the author’s marriage.

Before gaining national fame as a poet Stevens enjoyed a high respect among his colleagues. His life as a corporate lawyer did not impede his creativity as a lyric poet. Perhaps he only knew better than many others how abstract paragraphs and calculations have deep roots in concrete human reality. In 1946 Stevens was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, in 1950 he received the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and in 1955 he was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.