American poet who spent his working life as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, and produced, in the evenings and on long walks, one of the major bodies of philosophical poetry in English. Stevens published his first book, Harmonium (1923), at forty-four; the late work — Transport to Summer (1947), The Auroras of Autumn (1950), The Rock (1954) — is among the most sustained meditations on imagination, belief, and reality in modern poetry.
The central problem of Stevens's poetry is the situation of the imagination after the loss of the gods. "After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption," he wrote in his Adagia. The "supreme fiction" of his late work is not a substitute for religion but a rigorous attempt to think what poetry can do once it can no longer rely on inherited belief. The work is at once abstract and sensuous: Florida sunlight, blackbirds, jars in Tennessee, the figure of the snow man who "nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."
Stevens read William James and George Santayana at Harvard and remained a philosophical poet in a tradition that runs through Emerson — though his temperament was more skeptical, more European, and more committed to the demands of formal verse. The major essays in The Necessary Angel (1951) work out the relation between imagination and reality in prose; the late poems work it out in verse.