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This link may help you!.!.!.

http://en!.wikipedia!.org/wiki/Wallace_Ste!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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http://en!.wikipedia!.org/wiki/Wallace_Ste!.!.!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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just goolge it and get info of the internetWww@QuestionHome@Com

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well i did some quick research for you and am pasting it in here, but for your own research you may want to try, encarta on line, poetry society of america on line, and wikipedia!.


Wallace Stevens
Born October 2, 1879
Died August 2, 1955 (aged 75)
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a major American Modernist poet!. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and spent most of his adult life working for an insurance company in Connecticut!. His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "Sunday Morning ," and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird!."
Contents [hide]
1 Life and career
2 Poetry
2!.1 Imagination and reality
2!.2 Supreme fiction
2!.3 The role of poetry
2!.4 Reputation and influence
3 Bibliography
3!.1 Poetry
3!.2 Prose
4 References
5 Further reading
6 External links
[edit]Life and career



1936 Winged Liberty Head (Mercury) dime


Stevens' Hartford residence
Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist!. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903!. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel; after a long courtship, he married her in 1909!. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A!. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie!. (Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar!.) A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924!. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems!.[1] The marriage reputedly became increasingly distant, but the Stevenses never divorced!.
After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company!.[2] By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St!. Louis, Missouri[3]!. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company[4] and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life!. By 1934, he had been named vice president of the company!.[5] After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955[6], he was offered a faculty position at Harvard, but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice presidency of The Hartford!.
In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered on the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church!.
Stevens was baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr!. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St!. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from terminal cancer!.[7] This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Steven's daughter, Holly!. [8] After a brief release from the hospital, Stevens was readmitted and died on August 2, 1955 at the age of 75!. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery!.
Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age!. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine)[9] was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life!. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty!. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time[10], no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius!.
[edit]Poetry

Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, was published in 1923!. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s!. He received the National Book Award in 1951[11] and 1955!.[12]
[edit]Imagination and reality
Stevens is very much a poet of ideas, whose work was meditative and philosophical!.[10] “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,”[13] he wrote!. The relation between consciousness and the world--in Stevens, "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness, nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds!. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world!. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object!. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent!. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination!. This is no dry philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning!. Thus Stevens would write in The Idea of Order at Key West,
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds!.[14]
In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption!." [15] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible!.
Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us, and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world!. The world influences us in our most normal activities, "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible!."[16] Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape!.
As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", “the truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them!."[17] The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns!.
The jar is a striking example of an order that does not feel a part of the land, and so seems to violate the existing order, “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee”!.[18] Contrast this to the feeling one gets while looking over the water where boats are anchored in darkness, with lanterns hanging on poles, “Arranging, deepening, enchanting night”!.[19] When the imagination is available to reality and does not try to force itself, reality becomes like a bar of sand onto which the imagination naturally washes and recedes!.
The imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment - a particular time, place and culture - and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world!. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in their normal lives between the influence the world has on our imagination and the influence that our imagination has on the way we view the world!.
For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world!.
[edit]Supreme fiction
The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real!. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have!.[20]
Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice!. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a “Supreme Fiction!.” In this example from the satirical "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying notions of reality:
Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame!.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven!. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns!.
We agree in principle!. That’s clear!. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets!. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones!. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began!.[21]
The saxophones squiggle because, as J!. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: "A great many of Stevens’ poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement!.”[22] In the end, reality remains!.
The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real!.
I am the angel of reality,
seen for a moment standing in the door!.
!.!.!.
I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash;
!.!.!.
an apparition appareled in
Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone!?[23]
In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendWww@QuestionHome@Com

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