华莱士·史蒂文斯

华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens，1879年10月2日—1955年8月2日），美国现代主义诗人。他出生在宾夕法尼亚州里丁，一开始就读于哈佛大学，后进入纽约大学法学院，大部分生涯在康涅狄格州哈特福德保险公司作执行工作。在1955年，他赢得了普利策诗歌奖。代表作有《冰淇淋皇帝》、《一只乌鸫的十三种看法》和《坛子轶事》等。

史蒂文斯是一位大器晚成的诗人。他早年籍籍无名，四十岁之后才出版第一部诗集。他死后在哈罗德·布鲁姆、海伦·文德勒、弗兰克·多格特等评论家和学者的研究和推崇下才名声大噪。哈罗德·布鲁姆认为，史蒂文斯在美国的文化“气候（climate）”中获得了巨大成功，是超越弗罗斯特、庞德、艾略特等人的伟大诗人。

史蒂文斯的大部分诗作为“观念诗”，其艰涩难懂且拒绝诗评家对其进行透彻的分析。他在诗歌中通过观察外部世界以解释他的观念、哲理与玄思。海伦·文德勒认为，史蒂文斯诗歌的两个特点在于其诗是“观念的诗”、“词句的诗”。

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

Stevens's first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream", "Sunday Morning", "The Snow Man", and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951).

Many of Stevens's poems, like "Anecdote of the Jar", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Of Modern Poetry", and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", deal with the art of making art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955.

Life and career

Birth and early life

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 into a Lutheran family of Dutch and German descent. John Zeller, his maternal great-grandfather, settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee.

Education and marriage

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree three-year special student from 1897 to 1900, where he served as the 1901 president of The Harvard Advocate. According to his biographer Milton Bates, Stevens was personally introduced to the philosopher George Santayana while living in Boston and was strongly influenced by Santayana's book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion. Holly Stevens, his daughter, recalled her father's long dedication to Santayana when she posthumously reprinted her father's collected letters in 1977 for Knopf. In one of his early journals, Stevens gave an account of spending an evening with Santayana in early 1900 and sympathizing with Santayana about a poor review published at that time of Interpretations. After his Harvard years, Stevens moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating with a law degree in 1903, following the example of his two other brothers with law degrees.

On a trip back to Reading in 1904, Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886–1963, also known as Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer. After a long courtship, they married in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her poorly educated and lower-class. As The New York Times reported in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime." A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She was baptized Episcopalian and later posthumously edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems.

In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile may have been used on Weinman's 1916–1945 Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years, Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the couple remained married. In his biography of Stevens, Paul Mariani relates that the couple was largely estranged, separated by nearly a full decade in age, though living in the same home. By the mid-1930s, Mariani writes: "there were signs of domestic fracture to consider. From the beginning, Stevens, who had not shared a bedroom with his wife for years now, moved into the master bedroom with its attached study on the second floor."