Wallace Stevens Reads: The Idea of Order at Key West, Looking Across the Fields and Watching Birds Fly, and Other Poems

by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens achieved international recognition as a master craftsman and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Awards. Trained as a lawyer and employed as an insurance executive, Stevens' reputation has flourished since his death, and he is now considered one of America's most significant poets. His poems, marked by an unmistakable individuality, are exquisitely formed, full of lush figures and daring images. The listener will enjoy how Stevens wittily confuses all the arts in a luxuriance he called 'the essential gaudiness of poetry.'

Poems Included:

Side 1:

The Theory of Poetry (A Prose Note); The Idea of Order at Key West; Credences of Summer; The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain; Vacancy in the Park

Side 2:

Large Red Man Reading; This Solitude of Cataracts; In the Element of Antagonisms; Peulla Parvula; To An Old Philosopher in Rome; Two Illustrations That the World is What You Make of It 1: The Constant Disquisition of the Wind, II: The World is Larger in Summer; Prologues to What is Possible, II; Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly; Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour and The Life of a Poet (A Prose Note)

Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Wallace 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) 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, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

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.
A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

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. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain for the rest of his life.