IN THE SACRED PARK
87
Stevens died
in
August, 1955.
As
yet there is no biography of
him, and the few facts we have of his career we owe to Alfred
Kreymborg and to William Van O'Connor. The latter's book on
Stevens,
The Shaping Spirit,
is, in the main, an analysis of Stevens's
poetry, but covers in one brief chapter the objective data that have
thus far been made public about the poet's life. What we have here
are, for the most part, fairly unrevealing facts, like the date of the
poet's birth, 1879; we are informed that he attended Harvard until
1900 and graduated from New York Law School in 1904; and we
can make what we can of the following data: his ancestry was
Dutch, his wife's Polish; he had one daughter, Holly Bright, and
such and such of his poems were published at such and such in–
tervals. · Finally a detail which, though well-known, cannot but give
one, when stated, a sense of imminent revelation.
As
Mr. Van
O'Connor puts it: "Wallace Stevens has engaged the imaginations
of
his
fellow poets on many scores, not least that he has been an
insurance lawyer with, and since 1914 a vice-president of the Hart–
ford Accident and Indemnity Company." Having told us this fact
and insisted on its significance, Mr. Van O'Connor is oddly enough
determined that the fact itself should tell us nothing. He goes so far
as to inveigh against the image of Stevens which Alfred Kreymborg,
who had been a friend of the poet, sketched out for us in his book
Our Singing Strength.
This image Mr. Van O'Connor calls a
legend. Why? Because Kreymborg felt very strongly the peculiarity
of Stevens's position as a business man, in that it involved on
Stevens's part the conscious rejection of a professional poet's career.
Evidently for Mr. Van O'Connor, Kreymborg's image was of
31
poet not utterly intent on producing poetry, and it was this concep–
tion of Stevens that aroused his protest. But since a certain detach–
ment from poetry on the part of Stevens is quite evident, the whole
point is to determine the significance of his detachment, which is
what we are attempting here.
What about Alfred Kreymborg's picture? According to him,
Stevens, extremely shy and reticent, was for most of his life almost
completely withdrawn from the literary scene. He does not appear
to have followed the many controversies of clashing literary move–
ments or to have participated
in
the successive revolts against tra–
dition
and supports of
it,
that highlighted the literary
world
for
