Today is June 9 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “Are you doing what you love or are you wasting your time?”
Wallace Stevens was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who had an entire career outside of his writing.
The son of a successful lawyer, Stevens graduated Harvard University.
He briefly worked as a journalist in New York City before attending New York Law School and graduating in 1903. After working for several law firms in New York from 1904-1907 the American Bonding Company hired Stevens in 1908.
After his brief career in law, Stevens joined the home office of The Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1914.
By 1934, he had been named vice president of the company. It was during this time that he engaged in subtle maneuvers and started to write poetry at nights and on weekends. Stevens published his first book at 44 years of age. Harmonium was published in 1923 in an edition of 1500 copies.
The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines ("Life Is Motion") to several hundred ("The Comedian as the Letter C"). He would go on to produce additional works throughout the 1920s and into the 1940s. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955. After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice presidency of The Hartford.
By engaging in subtle maneuvers and writing poetry while working in the insurance industry Stevens is often described as one of America's most respected poets. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. But he was also a philosopher of aesthetics, vigorously exploring the notion of poetry as the supreme fusion of the creative imagination and objective reality.
Noted literary critic Harold Bloom, called him "the best and most representative American poet of our time.”