10/02/2026
Today, October 2nd, is the birthday of Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Stevens was born and grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania. As he is one of my favorite poets, I have made a pilgrimage to Reading to see associated sights (the big row house, the Presbyterian Church, etc.). This little essay, anonymous as far as I can discover, was sent today in the email from The Library of America. It is an excellent guide to appreciating a famously "difficult" poet. I thank LOA for helping me celebrate.
"Wallace Stevens: “A Poem Must Resist the Intelligence Almost Successfully”
When reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens (born on this day in 1879), one justifiable reaction is perplexity, perhaps even anger. In an essay included in Inhabit the Poem, published by Library of America last year, the revered critic Helen Vendler registered such an experience upon encountering a particularly resistant work of Stevens for the first time.
“The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws” made me ask why a poet would even write a poem that seemed unintelligible even to a habitual reader of poetry. Why, I wondered with some resentment, would a poet offer me a poem that presented such obstacles. Only later did I learn that Stevens had said that “the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully,” with the “almost” saving the day by its compliment to the persistent reader. There was, then, work to be done by the reader before the linear string of stanzas could be wound up into a perfect sphere.
This gradual realization of the poet’s purpose, the sense of having one’s mind pried open by initially unyielding art, is one of the great rewards of reading Stevens. Famously an insurance executive by day and poetic powerhouse by night, Stevens created a body of verse at once mysterious, bewitching, and pregnant with possible interpretations.
“Stevens’ way of informing us comes in language and imagery so radically different from previous times that it is difficult to recognize exactly what he means,” writes the scholar Dana Wilde, echoing Vendler’s dilemma. “But throughout his poetry he speaks, like the mystics, primarily of the nature of our relationship with the universe.”
A wish for total understanding, in these poems, is slowly replaced by curiosity and a thrilling surrender to the reverberations of language, an experience simultaneously private, turned inward, and cosmic, reaching for the infinite and universal. “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption,” Stevens posited, imagining his art not so much as an object of academic study or fixed meaning but as a gesture of faith, a conduit for making contact with the unknowable.
A testy 1940 exchange between Stevens and fellow poetic titan Robert Frost illustrates their deeply contrasting philosophies (and perhaps their competitiveness as well):
Stevens: Your poems are too academic.
Frost: Your poems are too executive.
Stevens: The trouble with you Robert, is that you write about subjects.
Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac.
Though reductive of each’s achievement, the flying barbs open some fascinating avenues for contemplating the two men’s work. Let us not forget that Stevens was indeed an executive by profession, and another way of saying “bric-a-brac” could be “multiplicity” or “profusion.”
Frost’s subjects may be more immediately comprehensible, grounded in observable reality— compare “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” to “The rudiments of tropics are around, / Aloe of ivory, pear of rusty rind”—but Stevens, as Vendler reminds us, does not abandon intelligibility altogether. Instead, in conjuring the supreme and symbolically evasive, he shifts the burden of subject-forming to the reader. Tasked with turning his linear strings of stanzas into a perfect sphere, we find ourselves active participants in his poetry, fellow interpreters of the eternal mysteries he plumbed."
