Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Stevens's first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).

Many of Stevens's poems, like "Anecdote of the Jar", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry", and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", deal with the art of making art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.