If poetry has more than its fair share of outsiders, American poetry has some of its oddest. Stevens spent his whole working life as vice-president of an insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut. He composed some of his greatest poems whilst walking to work and had his secretary type them up. Belonging to no movement, never hanging with any group, with few influences, he is almost a poet sui generis. Stevens was a unique and independent pedestrian amidst the world's flux (or perhaps it's more accurate to say the "flux of being" disclosed as the permanent world), and the enterprise was to fix it poetically in the intensest language. Stevens is the creative outsider operating alone.
-Theresa Duncan, THE WIT OF THE STAIRCASE
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1 comment:
-beautiful!
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