Wallace Stevens

b.1879  d.1955

A lifelong insurance executive for Hartford Accident and Indemnity may not seem the most likely candidate for a pulitzer- prize winning poet.  But Wallace Stevens not only won the Pulitaer Prize for his poetry in 1955 (for his Collected Poems), but has increasingly come

to be regarded by many as the greatest twentieth-century poet.  His poetry is at the same time lyrical and intellectually rigorous.  Stevens composed many of his

poems on the way to and from work,

and it seems fitting then that his poetry more than any other poet's concerns the transcendant power of the imagination.