Wallace Stevens

(1879 - 1955)

Wallace Stevens’ first published poems appeared in Poetry magazine in 1914 when he was in his mid-thirties. From 1916 on, he worked at a Hartford insurance agency and served from 1934 as vice president, remaining unrecognized as a major poet for much of his life. Stevens felt impelled to write—“one writes poetry because one must”—and published fourteen books of poetry, among them Harmonium and Opus Posthumous. The year of his death he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.