Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Secret Walks Through Brooklyn Heights

Wallace Stevens Photo credit: AP Photo

A note from our founder

Our fourteenth tribute goes to a poet who kept two entirely separate lives running side by side for decades — and who quietly did some of his earliest thinking about imagination and reality on walks through Brooklyn Heights, long before anyone at the office knew he wrote a line of verse.

A Double Life in the Making

Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania, and attended Harvard College before earning a law degree from New York Law School. He went on to live one of the more remarkable double lives in American letters: by day, a highly successful, buttoned-up corporate executive who eventually rose to vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in Connecticut; by night, and on his daily walks, the author of some of the most intellectually dazzling poetry in the English language. He kept the two worlds so separate that many of his corporate colleagues had no idea he was a major poet until he won the Pulitzer Prize late in life.

Wandering Brooklyn Heights

Before settling into his corporate routine in Connecticut, Stevens spent a formative decade living in New York City. At the turn of the twentieth century, he lodged in a boarding house at 441 Amsterdam Avenue and regularly drifted over to Brooklyn Heights and the waterfront to escape the congestion of Manhattan. His journals from that period are full of the harbor, the ferry rides, and the shifting atmosphere of the cityscape — the raw material, it turns out, for the deeply philosophical relationship between reality and imagination that would define his poetry for the rest of his life.

Imagination Against the Void

Stevens's poetry became known for its extraordinary vocabulary, its richly sensory language, and its central preoccupation: how the human mind uses imagination to make meaning in a world that had lost its traditional religious certainties. He won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Award in 1955, just months before his death on August 2 of that year.

Major Books & Collections

Poetry Collections

• Harmonium (1923) — His stunning debut collection, published when he was 44 years old. It features some of his most famous, musically dazzling poems, including "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "Sunday Morning."

  
  

• Ideas of Order (1935) — A more somber, structured collection responding to the economic and social chaos of the Great Depression, exploring the artist's duty to create spiritual order through language.

  
  

• The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) — A brilliant, book-length series of stanzas inspired by Pablo Picasso's painting, serving as a massive meditation on the eternal conflict between reality ("things as they are") and the transformative power of art.

  
  

• Parts of a World (1942) — A wartime collection heavily preoccupied with the nature of change, destruction, and how poetry can serve as a vital defense against the violence of the modern world.

  
  

• Transport to Summer (1947) — A deeply philosophical volume containing major long-form poems like "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," where he lays out his theory that poetry must replace lost religious myths.

  
  

• The Auroras of Autumn (1950) — A late-career masterpiece filled with elegiac, wintry meditations on aging, cosmic scale, and the ultimate impermanence of the physical world.

  
  

• Collected Poems (1954) — The monumental, career-spanning definitive volume that swept the literary world, earning Stevens both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

READ STEVENS

Start with Harmonium for the poems that made his name, or Collected Poems if you'd rather take in the full sweep of his career at once. Either way, it's worth remembering how much of that imagination first stirred on quiet walks along the Brooklyn waterfront, long before Wallace Stevens the insurance executive ever met Wallace Stevens the poet on the page. Get the book.

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