This Sunday night’s poet, the last of 2023, is Wallace Stevens, a contemporary and friend of William Carlos Williams. Like Williams he had a fairly demanding day job, in his case as an executive at a life insurance company.

Stevens seems to me someone of an artistic and (perhaps to his contemporaries) “unmasculine” temperament who, led first by his father (who demanded he go to law school in order to be able to earn a living) and then perhaps by his own choice, split himself into two pieces:

On the one hand we have Wallace Stevens the corporate vice president, ensconced in the world of business, living in the upper-middle-class environs of suburban Connecticut, and enjoying manly pursuits like fishing trips to Key West—on one of which of which he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway. (Stevens also shared in the casual racism so prevalent at the time—no one today would think of titling a poem “Like Decorations in a N----r Cemetery,” as Stevens once did.)

On the other hand, there’s the Wallace Stevens who hoped as a youth to make a living as a writer, enjoyed the artistic life of New York City, and wrote and published esoteric poetry that his fellow businessmen could neither understand nor appreciate.

Those who knew Stevens at his work thought him “cold.” Since we’re starting winter here in the northern hemisphere, I thought I’d go with perhaps his coldest poem, “The Snow Man”: