Wallace Stevens and Mahatma Gandhi share the same birthday.
Wallace Stevens was born on October 2nd, 1879, in Pennsylvania. He passed out of New York Law School in1903. A poet of ideas, Stevens began writing poetry in his teenage years. However, he was thirty four when his first poetry appeared in magazines. He took the pen name of Peter Parasol. Later, he wrote in his own name. ‘Harmonium’, his first collection of poems, was published when the poet was forty four years of age.
Steven’s poems were meditative and philosophical. ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ was his next book. ‘Collected Poems’ appeared in 1954. Stevens also wrote nonfiction.
‘Anecdote of the Jar’, ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’clock’, ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, and ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ and ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ are some of his famous poems.
Wallace Stevens was fond of the long poem, and metrical patterns. The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry was awarded to Wallace Stevens for his ‘Collected Poems’, in 1955.
A volume of critical essays, ‘The Necessary Angel’, appeared in 1951. Stevens died on August 2nd, 1955.