American Literature / Unit 14 AML 1322 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Wallace Stevens: The Insurance Executive
Captions available
The idea
Stevens spent his working life as an insurance executive in Hartford and wrote some of the century's strangest poetry in the evenings. His subject is the relation between imagination and reality, and his surfaces are gaudy, comic and abstract at once.
In practice
An insurance man, writing the strangest poems.
Where people slip
The day job is not a joke; it shaped the work's privacy.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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