Wallace Stevens

Stevens spent most of his adult life in Hartford, Connecticut, as an executive at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. His first book, Harmonium, appeared in 1923, when he was already in his forties, so the office career and the poetry career ran side by side rather than one replacing the other.

Common entry points are "Sunday Morning," "The Snow Man," "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." All are tied to Harmonium, his 1923 debut collection, and show his mix of plain American objects with abstract philosophical pressure.

He won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems. That same late-career volume helped secure his reputation shortly before his death in Hartford in 1955.

The poem appears in his 1936 collection Ideas of Order and centers on a singer by the sea in Key West. It is one of his clearest statements about imagination, reality, and the human need to shape the world through art.