Wallace Stevens Collection
The modernist poet Wallace Stevens produced some of the century’s most challenging works while employed as an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut. A native of Reading, Pa., Stevens attended Harvard as an undergraduate but left in 1900 before completing his degree. He later earned a law degree at New York School of Law. Working in insurance law but still intent on becoming a writer, he did not publish his first book of poetry until he was 44 years old. Over the last thirty years of his life, he became one of the most revered contemporary poets in the country. Stevens died of cancer in 1955.
Touching on poetry, criticism, and books, the collection consists primarily of letters received by the poet Wallace Stevens along with 35 annotated volumes from his personal library. Among the correspondents represented are Charles Tomlinson, Jean Wahl, Conrad Aiken, and the art collector and Stevens’ close friend Henry Church; there are also retained copies of three letters from Stevens: two regarding an honorary degree at Harvard, and one to Tomlinson declining to respond to Tomlinson’s analysis of “The comedian as the letter C.” The books included in the collection have annotations or inscriptions to or by Stevens.
Background on Wallace Stevens
One of America’s most distinctive modernist poets and one of the most challenging, Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. Entering Harvard as an undergraduate in 1897, Stevens immersed himself in the college’s slender literary scene, however his family’s financial straits obliged him to leave without a degree in 1900. Delaying, but not dampening his desire for a career in writing, Stevens soon landed a position at the New York Evening Post, but just as soon, he grew restless and bored and abandoned journalism. Instead, he followed his father’s advice, taking a law degree at New York School of Law in 1903 and settling into the staid life of a specialist in insurance law. As he began working his way through law firms in New York City, he married Elsie Viola Kachel in Sept. 1909.
Although he appears to have written sparingly while in New York, Stevens indulged in the artistic and literary scene and returned bit by bit to poetry. As his legal career led him away from the city to the suburbs of Hartford, Connecticut, and a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company (1916), Stevens began to publish in small magazines, leading to his first volume of poetry in 1923. Published when Stevens was already 44 years old, Harmoniumwas initially little noticed and not particularly well received critically, however several pieces have become central to the canon on which Stevens’ reputation lies, including “Sunday morning,” “Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird,” and “The emperor of ice cream.”
In Hartford, Stevens continued to produce slowly, with his second book, Ideas of order, not appearing until 1933 (with a revision and expansion in 1935). Its appearance, however, sparked the critical attention that Harmoniumdid not. Although sometimes criticized for obscurantism and disconnection with events of the world, his work was lauded for its philosophical richness and complex thought about imagination and reality, ideas that he pursued in later writing.
As Stevens entered his seventies, he was increasingly recognized as one of America’s most important contemporary poets, receiving a succession of prizes and honorary degrees, including the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1949), the Frost Medal of the Poetry Society of America (1951), the National Book Award (1951 and 1955), and the Pulitzer Prize (1955). Diagnosed with stomach cancer in March 1955, he succumbed on August 2, 1955, and is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford.
Contents of Collection
Touching on poetry, criticism, and books, the collection consists primarily of letters received by the poet Wallace Stevens along with 35 annotated volumes from his personal library. Among the correspondents represented are Charles Tomlinson, Jean Wahl, Conrad Aiken, and the art collector and Stevens’ close friend Henry Church, and there are retained copies of three letters from Stevens: two regarding an honorary degree at Harvard, and one to Tomlinson declining to respond to Tomlinson’s analysis of “The comedian as the letter C.”
Notes on the Stevens Library Collection
Notes and correspondence found in admin files in 2566 files cabinets indicate the Wallace Stevens Library is of questionable archival integrity. Reference correspondence by UMass Amherst Librarian Benton Hatch to a researcher in 1969 notes that “Since Mr. Stevens did not use a book-plate, and in only one instance signed his name, and since the dealer added subject-wise related material from his own stock, any listing, even if it would now be possible to achieve, would be valueless because it would be unprovable. It was for the above reasons that no list was attempted when the purchase was made.”
A second instance of a Stevens’ ownership signature and a few more volumes with annotations in Stevens’ hand have since been discovered. There are now 35 titles in the UMass catalog with a searchable collection title of “Wallace Stevens’ Library.” These 35 have evidence that they were in fact owned by Stevens. A typescript list found in the admin file has 40 titles plus 4 runs of periodicals. Six of the titles on the list are Stevens’ own works, five with no indication that they were his copies, and the sixth is a rare copy of the suppressed 1952 Fortune Press edition of “Selected Poems” which was donated to the library by Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Hopkins III. Three of the periodicals on that list may or may not have been owned by Stevens. The fourth, “New Verse,” has a renewal invoice to Stevens bound in.
Below is a transcription of handwritten notes in the admin file, unsigned and undated, but presumably mid-1980s or later (Stevens d.1955 plus 30 years), possibly written by John Kendall:
Some thirty years ago, the library acquired from a bookseller a selection of books from the library of the poet Wallace Stevens, most of them serviceable copies of titles such as would be likely to be found in the working library of a scholar in literature or some related field in the humanities. Most of these volumes carried no evidence of their having belonged to Stevens, and were altogether unidentifiable as such (he did not generally even write his name in his books), so that his estate saw no reason not to dispose of the collection as an ordinary second-hand scholarly library. Along with the books, the library acquired duplicate copies of periodicals containing writings by or about Stevens, and a few papers, mostly correspondence to Stevens, often “laid in” the books. Apparently these latter items were overlooked or were thought by the estate to be without value.
On close inspection of the individual volumes in the process of cataloging, however, librarians here discovered some annotations, generally sparse, often consisting of underlinings, vertical lines in margins of texts, a few words on dust jacket flaps; there were 22 such volumes. All of these, together with the other Stevens items, were placed in Special Collections. There they were catalogued too late for the first edition (1960) of American Literary Manuscripts, a guide to the location of the papers of American literary authors, but when the second edition was compiled in the ’70’s, the University of Massachusetts Stevens materials were reported there; it was published in 1977. The late Peter Brazeau, a professor of English at St. Joseph’s College in West Hartford, and a Stevens scholar, followed up on the first notice to the scholarly world of these Stevens materials (the bulk of Stevens’s literary remains are at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California) and was sufficiently impressed with their potential importance to prepare a listing of them which he published in the Wallace Stevens Journal (Spring, 1978). Since that time, a fairly steady stream of scholarly inquiries and visits has developed. During the past two years, no fewer than four major studies of Wallace Stevens have made use of the University of Massachusetts materials:
The collection consists of some 20-odd volumes from Stevens’s library and annotated by him, presentation copies of books of others to him, over 100 periodical appearances of writings by or about Stevens (26 of them not listed in the standard Stevens bibliography), and seven folders of correspondence, mostly letters to him (often formal or ceremonial, but sometimes substantive) but including three by him.
There is also a list compiled by Royann Hanson of 26 article citations, titled “Not Listed in Edelstein”, which are presumably the 26 items not in the “standard Stevens bibliography” mentioned in the transcribed no
tes.
Administrative information
Access
The collection is open for research.
Language:
Provenance
Gift of Donor, Feb. 1960.
According to Peter Brazeau, after a 1959 Parke-Bernet sale of items from Stevens’ library, a Hartford-area book dealer acquired some of the remaining volumes from Elsie Stevens along with some of Stevens’ papers. Some of these were in turn purchased by the library at UMass Amherst.
Bibliography
Brazeau, Peter, “Wallace Stevens at the University of Massachusetts: check list of an archive,” The Wallace Stevens Journal, 2 (1978): 50-54.
Processing Information
Processed by I. Eliot Wentworth, Aug. 2017.
Copyright and Use (More information)
Cite as: Wallace Stevens Papers (MS 365). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.