Life & Background
Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879, studied at Harvard and New York Law School, and spent his entire working life in insurance, joining the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company in 1916 and rising to vice-president. He walked to the office composing lines in his head and had his secretary type them. He published Harmonium in 1923, at forty-four, to almost no attention, and then wrote very little for nearly a decade. The major work came in his fifties and sixties. He kept his poetry almost entirely separate from his professional life, declined to move to a university post, and travelled little, drawing on Florida and on postcards from correspondents for the exotic imagery of the poems. He won the Pulitzer in 1955, shortly before his death.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
The poem gives instructions for a wake. In the first stanza, someone is told to call the roller of big cigars, the muscular one, and have him whip up curds in kitchen cups; girls are to dawdle in their everyday dresses and boys to bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem, the stanza concludes: the only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. In the second, a sheet is to be taken from a dresser missing three glass knobs and spread over the dead woman's face; if her horny feet protrude, they show how cold she is, and dumb. The lamp is to affix its beam, and the refrain repeats.
The poem sets the physical facts of death — the cold feet, the makeshift sheet — against the living appetite of the wake, and refuses consolation in favour of what actually is: let be be finale of seem. Ice cream is the perfect emblem because it is delicious and it melts, which is Stevens's recurring position that in the absence of God the imagination must supply what he called a supreme fiction, known to be a fiction and believed in anyway. His diction is deliberately extravagant — invented sounds, French, absurd titles — and this is not decoration but a claim that the imagination's play is the serious business. Sunday Morning, Anecdote of the Jar, and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird each work the same seam between reality and what the mind makes of it.
Why Stevens Matters
Stevens is the most sustained philosophical poet in American literature and the central figure for criticism concerned with the imagination's role after the loss of religious belief — Harold Bloom and J. Hillis Miller both built major readings on him. His work is the standard counterweight to Eliot's religious modernism and to Williams's plain-speech alternative, and his double life as executive and poet is a permanent curiosity in the biography of American letters.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Harmonium1923
- Ideas of Order1936
- The Man with the Blue Guitar1937
- Parts of a World1942
- Notes toward a Supreme Fiction1942
- The Auroras of Autumn1950
- Collected Poems1954