Biography Page
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Here is Wallace Stevens, looking, as he does in most of his photographs, like the lawyer, family man, and insurance company vice president that he was. Born in 1879, he was also one of the twentieth century's finest American poets, an art collector, and a man who would bring a bag of his favorite sticky buns to a formal business meeting. In 1916, Stevens moved from New York to Hartford, Connecticut, where he remained throughout his life. He composed his poems as he walked to and from work at Hartford Accident and Indemnity. In the 1920s, while other notable American modernist writers were enjoying a dissipated existence in Greenwich Village, Stevens was carving out a career in the corporate world. His first book of poetry, Harmonium, did not appear until 1923, at which time he was 36. When reviews of that book did not meet his hopes, he ceased writing for some time, and did not publish again until the mid-thirties (although in 1931, when Harmonium was reprinted, he added eight new poems). In the 1930s he entered the world of New York literary salons, as a friend of Barbara and Henry Church, whom he visited on his Saturday jaunts to New York City. He continued to write poetry through his 70s, and many critics believe that his best poetry was written in his later years. In 1942 Stevens began writing speeches that explained his theories of the imagination, which are collected in The Necessary Angel. Stevens died in 1955. For links to sites devoted to Wallace Stevens on the Web, click here. |
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Kenneth Burke, one of the more distinctive, if eclectic, critical minds of the twentieth century, was also a poet, short story writer, and music critic, publishing in both the The Dial and The Broom in the 1920s. In fact, his short story "Prince Llam" caused The Broom to fold in 1924 when the story was deemed obscene by postal authorities. In 1925, The Dial launched his career as a literary critic by publishing "Psychology and Form." Currently, Burke's influence is most notable in composition theory, a subject of which he had little to say but much to inform, as his own writing style follows a spiral path that challenges the linear laws of expository composition. Burke's relationship to American modernism spans back to his early youth. Born in 1897, he attended high school in Pittsburgh with Malcolm Cowley and James Light, and shared quarters with both, as well as with Djuna Barnes, in Greenwich Village during the late 1910's. His critical works can be seen as a parallel to modernist experiments in literature. They are, at any rate, outside the mainstream of his time's critical thinking. Perhaps this is because Burke was in large part self-educated, attending Ohio State University and Columbia University only briefly. Burke died in 1993 at the venerable age of 96. For more on Kenneth Burke on the Web, click here to go to the Kenneth Burke Society's Web site. |
