Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He studied at Harvard and the New York Law School. He spent most of his life (1916-1955) in Hartford, Connecticut, where he worked as a legal advisor for an insurance company. His poetry draws elements from Whitman, Emerson, the English Romantics, and his contemporary Imagists. Stevens' first creative period began around 1914 and concluded in 1923 with the publication of his first poetry collection, "Harmonium." "Sunday Morning," his most famous poem, belongs to this period. His second creative period started around 1934 and continued until the end of his life in 1955. During these years, he wrote, among other works, the long poems "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (1937), "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "Transport to Summer" (1946), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1947), "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1949), as well as a series of essays on the theory of poetry collected in a volume titled "The Necessary Angel" (1951). He was honored with the Bollingen Prize (1950) and the Pulitzer Prize (1955).