Dead Poets Live: Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Pennsylvania in 1879, married once, had one child, lived most of his life in the same place, where he worked as a lawyer in the same insurance firm. He died in 1955. His biography, compared to the lives of other poets, is supremely prosaic. His poetry, by contrast, is abstract, fantastical, speculative, artificial, strange and preoccupied, self-referentially, with its own medium. And yet no poet of the twentieth century made a more brilliant case for abstraction, fantasy, speculation, artifice, strangeness and above all poetry as the medium in which we really exist. For Stevens more than almost any other poet, poetry was, quite literally, life. 

‘The poem’, according to Stevens, ‘must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully’. In the spirit of that ‘almost’, Dead Poets Live return to Wilton’s to help Stevens’s great poems yield up some of their beautiful mystery, and in so doing present the case for ‘the best and most representative poet of our time’ (Harold Bloom), author of ‘the greatest American poem of the twentieth century’ (Yvor Winters), a phrasemaker, an astonishing observer of scene and landscape, a passionate poet of many moods, whimsical, austere, comical, bleak, always delightful and, when least expected, profoundly moving. 

Photo credit: ©AP/Alamy