The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens

by Paul Mariani

A perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century—Wallace Stevens—as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.

Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression in his poetry. His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times, as well as the creator of a poetry which has had a profound and lasting impact on the modern imagination itself.

Stevens established his career as an executive even as he wrote his poetry, becoming a vice president with an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. His first and most influential book, Harmonium, was not published until he was forty-four years old. In these poems, Stevens drew on his interest in and understanding of modernism. Over time he became acquainted with the most accomplished of his contemporaries, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams among them, but his personal style remained unique. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, losing himself by writing poetry in his study. Yet he had a witty, comic, and Dionysian side to his personality, including long fishing (and drinking) trips to Florida with his pals and a fascination with the sun-drenched tropics.

People generally know two things about Wallace that he is a “difficult” poet and that he was an insurance executive for most of his life. Stevens may be challenging to understand, but he is also greatly rewarding to read. Now, sixty years after Stevens’s death, biographer and poet Paul Mariani shows how over the course of his life, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Nonfiction, History, Literary Criticism, Biography Memoir, Literature

496 pages, Hardcover

First published August 11, 2015

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Revisiting Wallace Stevens

I have returned to the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879 -- 1955) many times in my adult life and was glad to find this new biography, "The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens" (2016) by Paul Mariani. The University Professor of English at Boston University, Mariani has published several volumes of poetry together with biographies of the American poets Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Hart Crane, and now Stevens. I read and learned from Mariani's biography of Crane, "The Broken Tower" which I reviewed in 2002 on Amazon.

I have loved Stevens' difficult poetry for its own sake. He has inspired me over the years in his ability to combine artistic achievement with career success as a lawyer and executive for an insurance company. Other 20th century Americans who combined career with art include W.C. Williams and the composer Charles Ives. Williams and Stevens knew each other well, and their friendship is discussed in this biography. Ives and Stevens apparently did not know one another, and the parallels and differences in their lives may be a subject for exploration.

I also have loved Stevens for the strongly philosophical cast of his poetry. He is one of the rare poets who work in the realm of thought as well as in the concreteness of experience. The philosophical tenor of Stevens' poetry owes something to his student years at Harvard where he got to know George Santayana and, to a lesser extent, Josiah Royce. I have been studying the American idealist philosopher Josiah Royce in recent years. In reading Mariani's biography, I saw parallels between his absolute idealism and Stevens' absolute fiction that I hadn't thought about before.

In reading a biography of a person one admires, the reader sometimes learns about the person for what he is, separately from the person's accomplishments or from the reader's picture of him. There is a tendency to over-intellectualize or to idealize. I found this the case in learning about Stevens through Mariani's biography. Stevens was frequently petty, cold, wedded to business, and uninspiring. There is always something inexplicable about how a very human, fallible person could rise to great accomplishment. With Stevens, this is sometimes jarring.

Mariani's biography, for me, tended to separate rather than integrate Stevens the man from Stevens the poet. Part of the separation is a result of Steven's publication of his first book of poems, "Harmonium" in his early 40s. Thus the early parts of Mariani's biography concentrate on Stevens' life, including his childhood in Reading, Pennsylvania, his studies at Harvard, his years as a young struggling journalist in New York City, and his courtship and marriage. Mariani describes Stevens' efforts in poetry and his formation of ties in modernist literary circles during this years but the focus is on the person. When the book reaches the publication of "Harmonium" and the second half of Stevens' long life, the focus changes. To a degree, the reader loses site of Stevens the person. Instead, the biography becomes more a work of literary criticism as Mariani studies many of Stevens' poems while offering interpretation of them based on Stevens' life. The book comes into its own with the literary interpretations more than with the straightforward biography, granting that the two would be intertwined in the biography of a poet. In addition to the poetry, Mariani also discusses and analyzes the many lectures and essays on the nature of poetry that Stevens gave in his latter years.

Throughout his book, Mariani discusses the imagination and its relationship to reality in Stevens' poetry. Early in the study, he offers the following interesting observation.

"After all, the imagination had to be served, because most people -- himself included -- lived far too ordered lives and moved in the same monotonous groove day after day. Life was what humans cried out for, and that was not to be found in going to and from work on the subway. What mattered most was breathing in the pure oxygen of the imagination. Wasn't Poe's short, tragic life far more exciting than the life people like himself led, surrounded as they were by walls: office walls, apartment walls, yes, and the walls of the subway stations they found themselves imprisoned in each day?"

I learned a great deal about Steven's poetry, his response to the World Wars and to politics. As mentioned above, I also saw a great deal more into Stevens' philosophy than I had known before. The study enhanced my appreciation of Stevens. But with the exception of the ten years between the publication of "Harmonium" and his next book, and the account of Stevens' death bed conversion to Catholicism, his life largely drops out in the latter sections of the book. In fact, many scholars have questioned the claim that Stevens converted at the end of his life or at any time. Helen Vendler makes this point, and many others, in her critical review of Mariani's biography, "Wallace Stevens: The Real and the Made-Up" published in the July 14, 2016, New York Review of Books. With Vendler's criticisms in mind, I still find Mariani's book useful.

I found much to admire and to learn from in this curmudgeonly, private modernist poet. With his conservative politics, Stevens defies current stereotypes and to a degree stereotypes in his day as well. I still have my admiration for Stevens' combination of poetry with the business world but am less taken with the latter after reading this book. The biography could have used an introductory chapter or overview to tie the work together. As it stands, the book seems to me divided between a biography and a literary analysis. Still, I found this book provocative and thoughtful. It has encouraged me to reread Stevens again with older and perhaps more informed eyes. He is a uniquely philosophical poet whose works mean a great deal to me, as Mariani reminded me in this fine book.

Robin Friedman

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd not intended to read Paul Mariani's biography of Wallace Stevens, The Whole Harmonium. I have and enjoyed the fine 2-volume work on him by Joan Richardson, the first volume of which was published in 1986. Reviews of the Mariani biography, however, made a case for its high caliber and also reminded me that since Richardson's biography was 30 years old that Stevens needed a fresher look.

It's a quiet biography because Stevens was a quiet man. It's not fair to say he wasn't an interesting person because his towering intellect and literary gifts demonstrate otherwise. And it's not necessary for a poet to be a drunk or a philanderer or an adventurer in order for his biography to engage us. The fact of his quiet pattern of behavior, the way he lived his life, simply makes it more challenging for a biographer to keep us absorbed in the subject. Stevens is always linked with how he earned his living as a vice president of the Hartford Indemnity and Insurance Company. The particulars of his daily life is always a combination of his spending his days in insurance and his nights at home writing poetry. It's good poetry, but it's easy to understand how a man who lived a quiet, private life, one not marked by any unusual circumstance, any breath of misconduct or even anger, can cause a biographer to have to work hard to maintain interest in his subject.

One way, of course, and especially in the case of a great writer like Stevens, is to provide informative critical analysis of the man's work. Mariani's gloss on Stevens is detailed, but I'm not sure it adds anything to that of Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler, meaning we're left with a book which doesn't offer any new biographical material or new, insightful perceptions of the work. After 30 years, the biography by Joan Richardson is probably still definitive.

At the end of the book Mariani comments that 60 years after his death Stevens is considered one of the most important poets of the 20th and the still young 21st centuries, sharing a place with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. That comment, I felt, mitigated the misgivings I felt at questioning Mariani's criticism of Stevens's work. I believe Stevens ranks much higher than that.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

This biography of the American poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) by Paul Mariani covers the basics of Stevens’ long and eventful life: early years in Reading, Pennsylvania, Harvard and New York City; his involvement with New York City’s modernist poetry and painting scene in the 1910s; his turn away from that all to become an insurance company executive in Hartford, Connecticut in the 1920s but at the same making a delayed splash as a poet from his 40s on; and his travels around the US, but especially winters in Florida drinking and carousing with other patrician Americans.

While I appreciated having some biographical context for Stevens after purchasing the Library of America volume of his collected poems, I wasn’t very impressed by Mariani’s book. The biography proper is interspersed with Mariani’s readings of certain Stevens poems, which are long and detailed and led me to quickly page through the book until I could get back to learning about Stevens’ life itself. All that criticism and commentary of the poetry itself would work better in a separate volume along the lines of Eleanor Cook’s A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens.

The other flaw of the book is its insistence on avoiding any controversy or dark sides of life. Mariani closes the biography by quickly recounting claims that Stevens was baptised Roman Catholic on his deathbed. He completely fails to mention that Stevens’ daughter has disputed that this ever happened, and there is evidence against it. Stevens’ wife Elsie is known from other sources to have suffered from mental illness, but Mariani completely skirts around this, even though an artist’s spouse and their quirks are one of the biggest influences on his/her life, and we can’t truly get Stevens if we don’t know more about Elsie.

I haven’t read it yet, but I wonder if Joan Richardson’s two-volume biography of Stevens, published in the 1980s, is better.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to agree with a number of the reviews here: the analysis of Stevens' poetry I found at times to be as impenetrable as the poetry itself.

Generally, I think it is a solid biography, but I would say that you first have to have an interest in Stevens' poetry to find his story interesting. The poetry is great, in my opinion, because of the use of words and the ability to take the reader "elsewhere", even if elsewhere may not be understandable. What is clear, though, is where Stevens takes you is vivid, colorful, and sometimes amazing.

The life itself was almost opposite of the poetry: drab, gray, and workaday. A tough slog for a biographer and probably for the reader, too.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevens is remembered as a cold man who wrote abstract, unknowable poetry, but this book serves to crack that image, if not, for a time, reverse it. The early Stevens is especially interesting and he maintains a very human, open, warm nature through the first half of his life. The second half is sad, despite his executive success, though not pitied, and Mariani makes an excellent case for the philosophical soundness and human warmth in his later poems and his last years.

[Bruce Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stevens always baffled me but there was something about a poet who was an insurance executive, so I've paid attention. Now Paul Mariani's biography brings the two men together with eloquence, harmony, and a deep psychological understanding. A poet himself, Mariani explains Stevens' mystical work with profound insight.

[Christin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Meh. I read this hoping to get some insight into the poet himself--since I have loved the poetry of Wallace Stevens for years. Unfortunately, this volume is far too involved in its own analysis of the poems, and sometimes that analysis goes so far up the pole it's just annoying. Paul Mariani may be some kind of poetry expert--but it's very hard to tell. Mostly what he is, at least in this book, is a person who can use 45 words when only 2 are necessary to convey the same thought. I found that so tiresome I could not finish this biography. When the reader was given any insight into Stevens, it was because his own words were reproduced--not because Mariani told you anything. When Mariani reproduced Stevens' journal entries, they may have taken a sentence or two to explicate some situation--and Mariani would then slog on for the next hundred or so paragraphs about these, adding his own interpretation, obscure references from literature, mythology, philosophy or culture, and (mostly) from his own biased opinion-library. I found it all extremely--and I do exactly mean EXTREMELY--tiresome. I could not get to the end through such a swamp. The one value in this book is the insight it gave into the other people around Stevens--all the poets, artists, and celebrities, as well as the way poetry was published during the peak of his career. He never managed to make a living writing it, but he came incredibly close; had his tastes been less extravagant, he might have been able to support himself and his family. There was interest here, but it was so overshadowed, it took hard work and lots of digging to get to. I don't recommend this to anyone except the most dedicated or die-hard fan.

[The American Conservative]

The European poet Paul Celan once said that a poem “intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite.” For Wallace Stevens, this otherness was the world at large—the reason, perhaps, why his poetry contained so little but expressed so much.

Stevens was born October 2, 1879, and died August 2, 1955. Between these two dates quite a lot happened in the world. Fanatical ideologies were born, took control of states, and were defeated. Two global wars were fought: the first began with skirmishes on horseback and the second ended with the splitting of the atom. Human aviation was established, then militarized, and, finally, commercialized. Economic depressions wiped out the general optimism of the 19th century, and welfare systems were put in place as acts of material expiation. Frantic voices—either approvingly or with alarm—cried out that politics had replaced religion as society’s moral centrifuge. Telephones, cars, and antibiotics became commonplace, and the modern computer was already beginning its ascendancy toward societal ubiquitousness.

Stevens, however, was always somewhere else when the action happened and never spoke intelligently afterward about what took place.

http://www.theamericanconservative.co...

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't usually read literary biographies, largely because I end up disliking the subject a lot more than I did to start--sometimes to the extent that I can't read their works any more. But Stevens' life was so oddly divided between his poetry and his business career that I couldn't resist. And hand it to Mariani--despite Stevens often boorish behavior, I didn't lose respect for him. True, he drank too much, and that rumored fistfight with Hemingway was all his fault, yadda yadda, but his poetry was/is so brilliant, that I can easily overlook his minor character flaws. But too much of this volume is poetic explication--quote a line of the poem, then paraphrase, in often turgid prose, quote another line... And the paraphrases of reviews of his various books! That made it slow enough going to give it a lower star rating. Still, anything that serves to remind one of some of Stevens' poetry is probably worth it. It would probably pay to have a Complete Poems at one's side as one reads this.

[Deborah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some very good analysis of Stevens' poetry, but not a great biography. Mainly gleaned from Stevens' letters, in this book Stevens' marriage, his relationship with his daughter and the rest of his family is barely explored in any depth and not from the point of view of anyone other than Stevens. While his life was, admittedly, lacking in incident, the book gives the sense of basically skimming over the various years of his life with minimal effort to a deeper understanding of his mind and emotions and how he effected the other people in his life. A decent starting point for anyone interested in Wallace Stevens, but hardly a definitive biography.

[Clayton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neither a thorough biography of Stevens nor a full reading of his work, but somewhere stuck between. Mariani is still a friendly guiding presence, but there are other ways to get at the enigmas of the Hartford Hermit.

[Richard Needham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Educated as a lawyer, working for most of his life for the Hartford Insurance Company and rising to the level of vice president, yet a poet who is recognized as one of the greatest of the twentieth century: this was certainly not your ordinary life. He was born in Reading, PA and, once established in Hartford, never really left it: he never ventured further than New Haven or New York in later years. He walked to work every day, where his muse visited him and the muse often dictated his thoughts to his secretary once at work. He never left the US (although his poems often hint of time spent abroad) but traveled extensively as a surety claims lawyer for The Hartford in his early career. And, he was solitary (although friends with fellow poets such as William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore) and had a basically solitary marriage to a reclusive wife.

I enjoyed this biography for the way the author integrated the details of Stevens’ life and poetry, and how one aspect illuminated the other. There are interpretations of Stevens’ sometimes dense and puzzling poetry, which to me seem to document the poet’s quest for understanding life and ‘order’ (in its many manifestations) at the most basic level: the critic’s eye in, for example, a discussion of An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, seems particularly acute. And, for all his abstruseness, I discovered poetry by Stevens which was beautifully and simply done: his poems (from a distance across the sea) of soldiers in the trenches in France and Belgium of World War 1 have a poignancy and straightforward sympathy which speak eloquently of their plight. This is but one example, and I find myself now wanting to understand more of his poetry beyond the few in anthologies. This is an excellent biography of a remarkable person.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul Mariani’s “The Whole Harmonium” (The life of Wallace Stevens) is a complicated read, and compatible with the complexity of Wallace Steven’s poetry. It took me over six months to read and finish this well-written biography. In my estimation, Wallace Stevens was an anomaly within the era of Robert Frost (whom he detested), for he was one of the pioneers of the Modernist movement of poetry (where there are less boundaries to poetic style).

My purpose and steadfastness to finish reading this book was fueled by the question, “what motivated Wallace Stevens?” For one thing, he worked in the business world as a VP of an insurance company, all the way up to approximate his death at age 75, and dabbed poetry on the side. He was in a failed marriage, his wife being uneducated and unable to either appreciate or comprehend his poetry. He had familial difficulties, whether with his daughter, or with his father, and siblings, but eventually made peace with his daughter and some of his nieces and nephews. His funeral was sparsely attended and reminded of the sadness of his life.

His poetry was very complex, but brilliant and readers will struggle for meaning and interpretations. Some of his fans comment that it takes years of reading, re-reading, and introspection to fully appreciate. Wallace Stevens was living in an era where authority was being questioned, over the advent of two world wars, a depression, and the liberal slant towards literature and poetry. He is considered one of the Modernist poets, unbound to any specificity of rules or structure, but free will of expression.

[Lew Watts · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was determined the finish this book, which a friend gave me as a Christmas present. She had been prompted by a comment I had made on Wallace Stevens' work; that, although "difficult," I had long loved the crispness and vibrancy of his better-known poems. Paul Mariani has made a herculean effort to bring those poems into context, not only in Steven's life and beliefs but within the literary and philosophical communities in which he lived, often as a detached outsider. But it is a hard and, at times, tedious read—with all due respect, the text could have been edited down by half without losing any of the details; in fact, there is often too much description, particularly in the (almost) day-by-day accounts of Stevens' many business trips. This relentless detail makes it difficult to tease out the evolving nature Stevens' work, made harder at times by the quoting of stanzas with limited commentary. For this, I give Mariani's book 3 stars. On Stevens himself, despite his stature as one of the great 20th Century poets, I would struggle with one star. I am glad Mr Mariani avoided passing judgment on Stevens, leaving this to the reader. Stevens was not a likable man—he was, despite his wife's personal shortcomings, callous in his marriage, and with few exceptions he was dismissive of his peers. I can forgive many of his disparaging comments on other poets, but not his comments on Dylan Thomas after his sudden death. Could you not have afforded him some literary dignity, Mr Stevens?

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wallace Stevens was a complex man who wrote complex poetry---and many criticize the man and the poetry as cold and intellectual. From my 1984 masters theses until today, I have found heart and passion and music in Stevens work. Paul Mariani's biography does a good job of revealing the same in the man and his work.

Yes, Stevens was often boorish, hard to get to know, and sometimes expressed racist and bigoted opinions. Mariani does not shrink from showing that part of the man. But we also see Stevens "at play" in the warmth of the Florida Keys as well as in his poetry.

The analysis and discussion of the poetry is good enough for a biography, allowing for the man to explain the poetry and the poetry to explain the man to some degree. Mariani concludes that Stevens "is among the most important poets of the twentieth and still-young twenty-first century," placing him with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. I would agree in terms of the 20th century while adding three women to the list: Wislawa Symborska, Marianne Moore, and E;Elizabeth Bishop---and I would leave out judgement on the current century except that Steven's influence certainly has grown wit time.

This is a good biography for both the experienced reader of Stevens and someone wanting to begin to live a bit with the music of Crispin and his poetic islands and cold snow.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Curious Case of Ramon Fernandez, or “… why not say what happened?”

I enjoy seizing on a tiny detail in a book and worrying it to death like a cat with a loose thread. I hope it's clear, when I do this, that the detail somehow stands in for the larger book but, if it isn't clear, at least my review is different from others at this site, which often give a more traditional summary of a book's contents.

In this case, I'd like to draw your attention to Ramon Fernandez.

Paragraph for Stevens newbies: Ramon Fernandez is a name which appears in Stevens' 1935 poem “The Idea of Order at Key West” – read here. This poem is, I believe, one of his best-known poems. It appears in two of two anthologies of 20th century poetry I have lying around the house. It is an early work, with beautiful language, fun to read out loud, and relatively easy to understand. (However, I admit that I didn't understand it until it was explained to me by the greatest Stevens explainer of all time, Helen Vendler, into whose graduate lyric poetry seminar I managed to talk myself as a completely unqualified undergraduate 30+ years ago at Boston University, and the notes of which I have miraculously managed to hang on to through 20+ changes of address.)

On page 973 of my bedraggled 1975 edition of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the name Ramon Fernandez is foot-noted as follows: “Stevens pointed out to two of his correspondents that in choosing this name he had simply combined two common Spanish names at random, without conscious reference to Ramon Fernandez the critic: 'Ramon Fernandez is not intended to be anyone at all'.”

Furthermore, the Wikipedia page for this poem directs you to page 798 of The Letters of Wallace Stevens (available on Google Books here), in which Stevens states in a 1953 letter: “Ramon Fernandez is not intended to be anyone at all. I chose two everyday Spanish names. I knew of Ramon Fernandez, the critic, and read some of his criticisms but did not have him in mind.” A footnote here mentions another letter, from 1947, in which Stevens expresses a similar sentiment.

So it just really fries my biscuit when, at Kindle location 3008 (did I mention that I got a free e-copy of this book from Netgalley?), the author writes: “In the closing stanza the speaker turns to the one beside him, Ramon Fernandez, the philosopher, and ...”.

To be fair, other biographers of Stevens (e.g., see both James Longenbach and Janet McCann here) see similarly hellbent on introducing the real-life Ramon Fernandez into the equation. None of them, as far as I have read, has ever attempted to explain why Stevens would go to the bother of denying it later. Was Stevens just having a high-brow leg-pull at the expense of all of us? Was the post “Key West” career of the real-life Ramon Fernandez (he got mixed up with Nazis) an embarrassment? Was Stevens having a Freudian moment where his self-professed interior-random-vaguely-Latino-name-generator was really producing a profound philsophical reference?

As is probably obvious, I think that a bunch of self-styled intellectuals are building an elaborate structure out of nothing.

Don't words mean anything? The writer himself clearly expressed an opinion, amirite? If I, a guy who writes reviews that nobody reads on Goodreads, can know this and produce easily-findable online evidence about the identity of Ramon Fernandez, can't somebody who is actually hoping members of the reading public will pay good money for his book, do the same? In a book of hundreds of pages, can't this little detail be included? It's a lot more informative than a lot of details that managed to make it into my electronic galley copy.

I carped like this in a review of another book on this site, and received a comment: “...one mistake and you are tempted to damn the whole book? Seriously?” To which I reply: Yes, seriously. All the pieces matter. As an enthusiastic reader of non-fiction of all types, I have developed what I am pleased to call the kitchen-cockroach theory of reality-based written discourse, wherein, if your Average Schlubby Reader (ASR) can identify and refute factual errors in a book, there are undoubtedly other errors of fact ASR can't see, just like, when you can see one cockroach in your kitchen, there are a revolting crapload of vermin just out of your sight.

Like many biographies, this is a book of opinions and interpretation. In particular, the author seems determined to draw the reader's attention to Stevens' poetry in the context of both the politics of the age as well as Stevens' death-bed conversion to Catholicism, neither of which seemed to loom large in Helen Vendler's interpretation and explanation as I remember them now as through a glass darkly. I'm willing to give the author's point of view a try and I'll think about it some more, but at this writing I'm not convinced that they are any more relevant to Wallace Stevens than the philosopher/critic Ramon Fernandez is.

[Abranch71 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wallace had an interesting but seemingly sad life: law degree from Harvard, married against his father's wishes - never spoke to him again, argued and insulted Robert Frost, had fisticuffs with Hemingway, worked a boring job at The Hartford, wrote poetry on the side, was secretive about his personal life, stingy with affection, his wife and daughter were perpetually unhappy. I'd feel bad for the guy, but he was a racist jerk too. So there it is.

[Nicholas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got what I needed about Stevens's biography, but much of the book consists of the author's analyses of Stevens's poems and philosophy, and I found the analyses as difficult as the poetry. I didn't learn much, and what I did took work.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quality literary biography of a captivating poet and man. The explications of the poems were often hard to follow, and would have perhaps been more at home in the WS Journal; at the same time, the poetry itself is so complex, one cannot blame Mariani too much.

[Alex Compton · Rating 2 out of 5]

booooooooooring. If I wasn’t writing a thesis on stevens i would’ve dropped this even quicker. I sympathize with Mariani, as Stevens is a boring guy, but damn I think this biography could’ve at least been a bit more engaging as well as a bit shorter.

[Patrick Klous]

Shows Stevens as a man of desire. Properly weights his (supposed but likely) conversion to Catholicism.

[Marty Trujillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Professor Paul Mariani has done the nearly impossible. He has written a new biography of Wallace Stevens — the great American poet of the 20th century — that manages to breathe life into the tired Stevens cliché we’ve all come to know: The weary aesthete scribbling complex and obtuse lines after a day devoted to exploring insurance surety claims. Mariani’s principal achievement is in humanizing Stevens and helping us see beneath his stony, aloof, conservative manner.

In The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens, Mariani does a good job explaining why Stevens needed the day-to-day grind as an insurance executive at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. to modulate his life. Prone to depression, Stevens found that work life suited his nature, helped him maintain a regular schedule, provided a modicum of social interaction, and enabled him to build a better-than-comfortable life. Mariani also skillfully shows how Stevens’s work travel played a vital role in informing much of his poetry.

He also does a masterful job of exploring Stevens’s feelings about fellow poets Eliot, Pound, Moore, and Williams, and of detailing his professional feud with Frost. He also tackles Stevens’s notoriously icy relationship with his wife Elsie, describing clearly the effect the sour marriage had upon Stevens and his family. He also shares in surprising detail Stevens’s most important friendships — particularly with Walter Arensberg, Henry Church, and Harriet Munroe — which opened avenues of influence to Stevens, introducing him to painters, poets, musicians, dancers, and others connected with the NYC and international arts scenes.

Mariani also convincingly demonstrates that Stevens was always a contemplative. From his early devout life as a Lutheran to his later life ducking into the cathedrals of New York for “a daily majesty of meditation,” the inward-directed life suited his personal disposition and his quiet life. In fact, he was a bit of monk — a solitary poet whose main obsession seemed to be capturing the imagined reality that played behind the artifices of everyday life.

The introvert extraordinaire, Stevens baffles biographers and reviewers with his cold and mannered life and his unapologetic embrace of the solitary. It is to Mariani’s credit that he understands how critical this is to Stevens’s poetry and how it provided him recompense for the sad toll it took on those he loved.

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This good, solid, well-researched biography of acclaimed poet Wallace Stevens does all that a biography should - tells of the life, examines the work, offers some analysis and insight and quotes many primary sources. But what it doesn’t do is make Stevens come alive to the reader and make that jump from adequate to excellent. I found it a bit long-winded and wordy at times, and somewhat lifeless. Nevertheless I learnt a lot and gained a way in to the poetry, so for that I must perhaps overlook the uninspired writing.

[Keri · Rating 5 out of 5]

In poetry Wallace Stevens, in my opinion, is the inventor and is the top poet of the 20th century! I have to admit, this book isn't enticing or exciting. You have to be a poetry lover to really be into this book. Reading this book gave me a little more insight on Stevens and I believe is the best out of six biographies written about him. I say skip the first six and buy this one, it will give you so much more! Great book by Paul Mariani you did a superb job!

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a well-written and comprehensive biography. But it might be impossible to enjoy without having a volume of Wallace Stevens poetry nearby. The author makes many references with the assumption that the reader is familiar with all of Stevens' writing. There are also some awkward jumps in the chronology and very little about the Stevens family and why the distance from his wife. Overall it was about the poetry and that suited me just fine.

[Amanda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I normally like things like this. Finding the personal stories behind music and poems has always been really interesting to me. and the writing style is like reading a novel. But I'm afraid that Wallace Stevens, regardless of his poetry, lived kind of a boring life, which in turn makes a boring book.

*According to FTC regulations I disclose that I received this book through the Goodreads First-Reads program.*

[Jappel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gleaned some new perspective on Stevens's life and work. The work is more interesting than the life, but certainly shaped the thinking.

[World Literature Today]

"Not all biographers of literary figures manage to bring the dual tasks of telling a life story and providing meaningful analysis of the author’s work into balance, but Mariani consistently succeeds. Since he is himself a practicing poet, Mariani has an instinctive grasp of the process by which modernist poets achieved a mastery of their craft. His analyses of some of Stevens’s greatest poems—“Sunday Morning,” “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West”—offer precise, penetrating interpretations without lapsing into academically ponderous language." - Rita Signorelli-Pappas

This book was reviewed in the March/April 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Jeffrey Graham]

Excellent background - personal and personable. Real. With lovely intonations and explications of his poetry. The poet's turn towards imagination was grounded in the mundane. Fascinating. Much like Charles Ives the composer except Stevens overcame his reticence. Lovely read.