He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.

As The New York Times reported in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime.

[9] In later years, Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the couple remained married.

[8] In his biography of Stevens, Paul Mariani relates that the couple was largely estranged, separated by nearly a full decade in age, though living in the same home by the mid-1930s.

[22] Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, between 1922 and 1940, usually staying at the Casa Marina hotel on the Atlantic Ocean.

"[23] Key West's influence on Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order.

[26] The following year, Stevens was in an altercation with Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West.

In the 11 years immediately preceding its publication, Stevens had written three volumes of poems: Ideas of Order, The Man with the Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, and Transport to Summer.

[32] In 1950–51, when Stevens received news that Santayana had retired to live at a retirement institution in Rome for his final years, Stevens composed his poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome": It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, the pillowed porch, The book and candle in your ambered room.

According to Mariani, Stevens had a large, corpulent figure throughout most of his life, standing 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighing as much as 240 pounds (110 kg).

[34] It was determined that Stevens was suffering from stomach cancer in the lower region by the large intestines and blocking the normal digestion of food.

[35] By early June he was still sufficiently stable to attend a ceremony at the University of Hartford to receive an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree.

[47] In her book on Stevens's poetry, Helen Vendler writes that much of the early reception of his poems was oriented to symbolic reading of them, often using simple substitution of metaphors and imagery for their asserted equivalents in meaning.

For Vendler, this method of reception and interpretation was often limited in its usefulness and would eventually be replaced by more effective forms of literary evaluation and review.

Her studies of the longer poems are in her book On Extended Wings and lists Stevens's longer poems as including "The Comedian as the Letter C", "Sunday Morning", "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery", "Owl's Clover", "The Man with the Blue Guitar", "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War", "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", "Esthetique du Mal", "Description without Place", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", and his last and longest poem, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven".

A fourth school sees Stevens as fully Husserlian or Heideggerian in approach and tone and is led by Hines, Macksey, Simon Critchley, Glauco Cambon, and Paul Bove.

According to Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time,[57] no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.

His contemporary Harriet Monroe called Stevens "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to him".

[64] In the Southern Review, Hi Simons wrote that much of early Stevens is juvenile romantic subjectivist, before he became a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years.

Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world; reality is an activity, not a static object.

[67] In Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption.

"[68] But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens studied the art of poetic expression in many of his writings and poems, including The Necessary Angel, where he wrote, "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.

Milton J. Bates writes: in a 1948 letter to Rodriguez Feo, [Stevens] expressed his autumnal mood with an allusion to Nietzsche: "How this oozing away hurts notwithstanding the pumpkins and the glaciale of frost and the onslaught of books and pictures and music and people.

It is finished, Zarathustra says; and one goes to the Canoe Club and has a couple of Martinis and a pork chop and looks down the spaces of the river and participates in the disintegration, the decomposition, the rapt finale" (L 621).

"[83] The Poetry Foundation states that "by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers.

[85][86] Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the canon as one of the key figures of 20th-century American Modernist poetry.

By extension, E. E. Cummings was a mere shadow of a poet, while Blackmur (a contemporary critic and publisher) did not even deign to mention Williams, Moore, or Hart Crane.

This attitude is further illustrated by the following anecdote: "It happened during the meeting of the National Book Award committee that gave the poetry prize to Marianne Moore.

[90] Both titles of an early story by John Crowley, first published in 1978 as "Where Spirits Gat Them Home", later collected in 1993 as "Her Bounty to the Dead", come from "Sunday Morning".