A Poem for a Thursday #273

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading PA in 1879. He attended Harvard University until a lack of money meant he had to leave. He then worked as a journalist, eventually attended law school, and ended up as the vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company where he was employed for the rest of his life. After Stevens’ won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955 he was offered a position at Harvard. He declined because it would have meant leaving his position with The Hartford. (As a side point, I worked at The Hartford briefly when I first got out of high school.) Stevens’ poetry is sometimes described as difficult, “employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision.” Much of his poetry was written during his journey back and forth to his office and in the evenings.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

The House was Quiet and the World was Calm
Wallace Stevens