Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879, and died in Hartford, Connecticut, on August 2, 1955. Although he had contributed to the Harvard Advocate while in college, he began to gain general recognition only when Harriet Monroe included four of his poems in a special 1914 wartime issue of Poetry. Harmonium, his first volume of poems, was published in 1923, and was followed by Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, Transport to Summer, The Auroras of Autumn, The Necessary Angel, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and Opus Posthumous (first published in 1957, edited by Samuel French Morse; a new, revised, and corrected edition by Milton J. Bates, 1989). Mr. Stevens was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry of the Yale University Library for 1949. In 1951 he won the National Book Award in Poetry for The Auroras of Autumn, in 1955 he won it a second time for The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1955. From 1916 on, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice president in 1934.

Marianne Moore’s and Stevens’ work was published in the same journals, such as Others and Poetry, for years. Moore mentioned Stevens in her first major essay, “The Accented Syllable.” Of Stevens’ work, she wrote, “I am inclined to think that the meaning has little to do with the pleasure the words give us.” Stevens and Moore did not meet until 1943, but of their relationship he later wrote, “The web of friendship between poets is the most delicate thing in the world—and the most precious.”