Wallace Stevens

Poet and Hartford VP Wallace Stevens said that poetry is "a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right."

One of my favorite poems by Stevens:

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
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More about Stevens:

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He
attended Harvard as an undergraduate and earned a law degree from New York
Law School. Admitted to the U.S. Bar in 1904, Stevens found employment at
the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co. in Connecticut, of which he became
vice president in 1934. In November 1914, Harriet Monroe included four of
his poems in a special wartime issue of Poetry, and Stevens began to
establish an identity for himself outside the world of law and business.
His first book of poems, Harmonium, published in 1923, exhibited the
influence of both the English Romantics and the French symbolists, an
inclination to aesthetic philosophy, and a wholly original style and
sensibility: exotic, whimsical, infused with the light and color of an
Impressionist painting. More than any other modern poet, Stevens was
concerned with the transformative power of the imagination. Composing
poems on his way to and from the office and in the evenings, Stevens
continued to spend his days behind a desk at the office, and led a quiet,
uneventful life. Though now considered one of the major American poets of
the century, he did not receive widespread recognition until the
publication of his Collected Poems, just a year before his death. His
major works include Ideas of Order (1935), The Man With the Blue Guitar
(1937), Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction (1942), and a collection of essays
on poetry, The Necessary Angel (1951). Wallace Stevens died in Hartford in
1955.

Suggested Link:

Hartford Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens committed to raising awareness of Wallace Stevens in his hometown of Hartford, CT and beyond, through readings, discussions, and programs.
http://www.wesleyan.edu/wstevens/stevens.html