50 Fun Facts About Wallace Stevens

Which novelist knocked Wallace Stevens down in a 1936 fistfight in Key West, leaving the poet with a broken hand?

Ernest Hemingway floored the poet repeatedly outside a Key West party after Stevens swung first. Stevens broke his hand on his opponent's jaw and later apologized.

Wallace Stevens's wife Elsie is thought to have modelled for which American coin designed by sculptor Adolph Weinman?

The Mercury dime may carry Elsie's profile because Weinman was the couple's New York landlord and sculpted a bust of her. The same face is linked to his Walking Liberty half dollar.

Wallace Stevens spent his working life as an executive in which industry while writing poems in his spare hours?

Insurance paid the poet's bills from 1916 to the end of his life, and he kept the two worlds apart. He judged surety claims by day and composed on his way to and from the office.

In the opening of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, a woman lingers at home over coffee and which fruit?

Oranges and coffee stand for the earthly pleasures the woman chooses over church. Later her thoughts drift from that breakfast to the bread and wine of communion.

Wallace Stevens wrote a sequence of thirteen short, haiku-like sections describing ways of looking at which bird?

A blackbird is the one constant across the thirteen spare sections, which borrow the feel of haiku without its rules. A new-music ensemble took its name from the eighth section.

In Wallace Stevens's Anecdote of the Jar, the speaker sets a jar on a hill in which American state?

Tennessee is where Stevens was staying when he wrote the poem in 1918, in the town of Elizabethton. One scholar traced the jar to a real brand of canning jar called Dominion.

The Man with the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens is often linked to The Old Guitarist, painted by which artist?

Pablo Picasso painted the blind musician in 1903–04, and Stevens may have seen it exhibited in Connecticut in 1934. The poet always insisted he had no particular painting in mind.

Which prize did Wallace Stevens win for his Collected Poems in 1955, only months before he died that August?

The Pulitzer capped a late rush of fame for Stevens. Wide recognition only reached him with that collection, published a year before he died.

Which university offered Wallace Stevens a faculty post in 1955, which he declined rather than leave his day job?

Harvard, where Stevens had studied in the 1890s, wanted him back as a teacher at 75. Accepting would have forced him out of his company, so he said no.

Which fellow poet quarrelled with Wallace Stevens at a Key West hotel, dismissing his poems as bric-a-brac?

Robert Frost and Stevens clashed at the Casa Marina in 1935 and again in 1940. Stevens complained that his rival wrote about subjects, and was told in return that he wrote about bric-a-brac.

Which Poetry magazine editor cut three stanzas from Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning for its first printing in 1915?

Harriet Monroe printed only five of the eight stanzas, and in a different order. Stevens restored the full poem when it appeared in his first book in 1923.

Which bright green bird has been let loose on the rug in the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?

A cockatoo shares the bright room, its green wings part of the vivid comfort the woman enjoys. Once she thinks of the Crucifixion, bird and fruit alike lose their colour for her.

Which birds sink toward darkness at evening in the closing image of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?

Pigeons close the poem, drifting down on outstretched wings with no set course as night falls. Stevens closes not on an answer but on that slow, wavering fall.

In Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, the woman's daydream carries her across the seas to which ancient land?

Palestine draws her thoughts because it holds the tomb of Jesus, the old faith she is skipping that day. Near the end a voice tells her that no spirits linger at that grave.

Which Roman god's motherless birth in the clouds opens the third stanza of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning?

Jove stands for the remote gods who came before Christianity, born with no human tie to the earth. The stanza moves from him to Jesus and on to a paradise found in this world.

In Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, the speaker tells the doubting woman that what is the mother of beauty?

Death makes beauty possible in the poem, because only things that end can be cherished. The thought echoes the close of Keats's Ode on Melancholy.

In stanza seven of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning, a ring of chanting men show their devotion to what?

The sun is praised by the dancers as a source of life rather than as a god. Stevens offers their summer ring as a picture of worship with no church attached.

Which poetic form did Wallace Stevens choose for the eight fifteen-line stanzas of Sunday Morning?

Blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, gives the poem a stately sound closer to Wordsworth and Keats than to the experiments of his own generation.

Wallace Stevens once described his Sunday Morning as simply an expression of which pre-Christian outlook?

Paganism was the poet's own one-word gloss, though critics read more into it. Helen Vendler calls the poem his search for a truth to replace the Christianity of his childhood.

A peignoir is named in the first line of Wallace Stevens's Sunday Morning; what kind of garment is it?

A dressing gown sets the scene, because the woman is still lounging at home late on a day traditionally kept for worship. Stevens leaves her unnamed throughout.

In which Pennsylvania city, also the hometown of his wife Elsie, was the poet Wallace Stevens born?

Reading gave Stevens both his birthplace and his bride, whom he met on a visit home in 1904. His parents thought her beneath him, and no one from his family came to the wedding.

In which Connecticut city did Wallace Stevens live and work from 1916 until the end of his life?

Hartford became his home after a merger cost him his New York job, and he never moved away. He bought a 1920s Colonial there in 1932 and kept it for the rest of his life.

Which senior title did the poet Wallace Stevens hold at his Connecticut employer from 1934 onward?

Vice president was the rank Stevens reached at 54, and it paid about $20,000 a year in the depths of the Depression. He stayed at his desk well past the usual retirement age of 70.

A hospital chaplain said Wallace Stevens converted to which faith in his final months, a claim his daughter disputed?

Catholicism was the faith Father Arthur Hanley said he received the poet into at St. Francis Hospital in 1955. The daughter, who was not in the room, never accepted the story.

Which philosopher befriended the student Wallace Stevens and later inspired his poem To an Old Philosopher in Rome?

George Santayana traded sonnets with the young Stevens, who stayed devoted to him for life. The poem came when Stevens heard his old mentor was living out his last years in a home in Rome.

Before his corporate career, Wallace Stevens trained in New York for which profession, like his father before him?

The law ran in the family: his father was a prosperous attorney and two of his brothers took the same degree. Stevens qualified in 1903 and joined the bar the following year.

Wallace Stevens is ranked with T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as a leading American poet of which movement?

Modernism claimed Stevens late, since his first book did not appear until his forties. His biographer still placed Pound and Eliot in the poet's true circle of philosopher-poets.

Which debut collection by Wallace Stevens sold only about a hundred copies before its first edition was remaindered?

Harmonium flopped in 1923 even though it held many of his best-loved poems. Stevens had first wanted to call it The Grand Poem: Preliminary Minutiae.

Which New York publisher issued Wallace Stevens's first book in 1923 and his Collected Poems in 1954?

Knopf printed 1,500 copies of the debut and stayed with Stevens for three decades, through most of his major volumes to the final collected edition.

Which American literary honor did Wallace Stevens win twice, for The Auroras of Autumn and for his Collected Poems?

The National Book Award went to Stevens in 1951 and again in 1955. The first winning book takes its title from the northern lights seen in the fall.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens sets its kitchen bustle and dessert-making around which solemn occasion?

A wake is under way: in the next room a woman lies under an embroidered sheet while ice cream is whipped up for the mourners. Stevens counted the poem among his own favorites.

Wallace Stevens's Peter Quince at the Clavier retells which biblical woman's story, spied on by elders while bathing?

Susanna, a beautiful young wife in the Apocrypha, is watched by the elders as she bathes. Stevens turns their desire into music, with the scene played out like a piece for keyboard.

The Peter Quince in the title of a Wallace Stevens poem is a bumbling craftsman from which Shakespeare comedy?

A Midsummer Night's Dream gives Quince the job of directing his fellow workmen in a clumsy amateur drama. Stevens seats him at a keyboard instead, musing on desire.

Which wandering hero of Wallace Stevens's The Comedian as the Letter C sails from Bordeaux to Yucatán and Carolina?

Crispin sets out to found a colony of poets and ends up embracing ordinary domestic life. Stevens said the tale mirrored the kind of life led by millions of people.

In Wallace Stevens's Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, a drunken old sailor asleep in his boots dreams of catching what?

Tigers fill the sailor's dream, making him the one vivid soul in a town of plain white nightgowns. For Stevens he stands for a life with imagination in it.

Which companion does the speaker address by name near the end of Wallace Stevens's The Idea of Order at Key West?

Ramon Fernandez is the friend the speaker turns to once the woman stops singing, asking why the harbor lights now seem to arrange the night.

Which 1951 book gathers Wallace Stevens's essays on reality and the imagination, his main work of prose?

The Necessary Angel argues that imagination loses its vitality once it stops holding on to what is real. It followed directly after his Auroras volume of 1950.

Which painter made a 1970s suite of twenty etchings called The Blue Guitar, inspired by a Wallace Stevens poem?

David Hockney wrote on the frontispiece that he had been inspired by Stevens, who had been inspired in turn by an earlier painter. The portfolio was published in 1977.

Wallace Stevens left one great ambition unfulfilled: to rewrite which medieval epic for a modern, scientific age?

The Divine Comedy was to be reimagined for readers shaped by Darwin rather than by Plato. It remained the great unwritten project of his last years.

Which Wallace Stevens poem, first printed in Poetry in 1921, ends on the idea that its listener is himself nothing?

The Snow Man starts with frozen pines and a bitter wind, then turns the cold eye on the watcher. It reflects a skepticism Stevens absorbed from his old college mentor.

Which German philosopher, named in Wallace Stevens's Description without Place, shaped the poet's view of religion?

Friedrich Nietzsche gave Stevens a model for thinking about belief, change and the individual. In a 1948 letter the poet quoted Zarathustra, then described heading to the Canoe Club for martinis and a pork chop.

Which painter of whimsical, riddling symbols was Wallace Stevens's favorite, admired alongside Cézanne?

Paul Klee appealed to Stevens because his pictures were playful, enigmatic and never simply realistic. In Cézanne he admired the opposite gift, the world reduced to a few monumental objects.

Which critic called Wallace Stevens the best and most representative American poet of his time?

Harold Bloom also claimed that no Western writer since Sophocles had flowered so late, since many of the poet's finest works came after he turned 50.

Which fellow poet, a friend from Wallace Stevens's New York years, wrote his obituary for Poetry magazine?

William Carlos Williams, assigned the obituary, compared his friend's work to Dante's Vita Nuova and Milton's Paradise Lost. The two had moved in the same New York circle of poets since 1915.

Under which playful pseudonym did Wallace Stevens enter a 1914 war-poem contest run by Poetry magazine?

Peter Parasol did not win, but the editor liked the entry enough to print four of the poems that November. They were the first major publication of a man already 35.

Which job did Wallace Stevens hold briefly in New York straight after college, having dreamed of writing in Paris?

Reporter was the nearest thing to a writing life he could find, but the work did not last. He had planned to move to Paris and write, and chose a steadier profession instead.

In The Emperor of Ice-Cream by Wallace Stevens, the muscular man called to the kitchen is a roller of what?

Cigars point to Cuba, which Stevens visited on business trips to Florida and whose customs may lie behind the scene.

Which novelist quotes Wallace Stevens's poem The Plot Against the Giant in The Hotel New Hampshire?

John Irving is one of several storytellers to borrow from Stevens. Two novels by D. E. Tingle take their titles from Sunday Morning.

Which poem did Wallace Stevens himself choose as his best for the anthology This Is My Best?

Domination of Black dates from 1916, so the mature poet reached past decades of later work to pick an early piece haunted by the cry of peacocks.

What was the name of Wallace Stevens's daughter, who edited her father's collected letters after he was gone?

Holly also edited a collection of his poems and wrote Souvenirs and Prophecies, a book about the young poet. Doctors told her, not him, how serious his last illness was.