The Vice President of Shapes

POETRY The Vice President of Shapes In Hartford, Conn., a solid, conservative city of insurance companies, a solid, conservative old insurance man man died of cancer last week. He was was Wallace Stevens, 75, vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., a firm he had been associated with for for almost 40 years.

Stevens, said Wilson Jainsen, president of the company, "was renowned as a specialist in surety-bond work." Besides surety bonds, Wallace Stevens had another speciality that brought him worldwide renown. He was one of the finest poets of of a generation whose special need for poetry Wallace Stevens well understood.

He believed that 20th century man was subjected to an unprecedented bombardment of reality. "We are confronting a set events," he had written, "not only beyond our power to tranquillize them in the mind, beyond our power to reduce them and metamorphose them, but events that stir the emotions to violence, that engages us in what is direct and immediate and real, and events that involve the concepts and sanctions that are the order of our lives and may involve our very lives; and these events are occurring persistently with increasing omen, in what may be called our presence." In this situation, what is the poet's role? To cherish imagination not as escape from reality but as "the necessary angel" by whose shaping grace man's need to make sense of reality is fulfilled. Nobility must be expressed, wrote Wallace Stevens, because of a violence from within "that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."

The Single Artificer. What Stevens loved to sing of was order, by which he did did not mean tradition, which he knew and loved, or law, which he also knew and loved, but a meaning of order that is precedent totradition, law l and perhaps even logic. In one of his greatest poems, The Idea of Order at Key West, he wrote : If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many -waves ; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind . . Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Rage for Order. Stevens knew that a poet has to be "contemporaneous." But his response to the reality around him was almost untouched by satire or social criticism In that way he was less contemporaneous than T. S. Eliot, say, or even James Joyce. But Stevens was very close to the central tension of his time: with a controlled violence, a rage for order, he fought back against the tumultuous reality of the most "real" of centuries.

There are some curious and probably relevant specific details about him. His wife had been a model for Miss Liberty, the head on the U.S. dime. He was fat, but fought it. He accepted routine, arriving at his desk at 8:15. He composed many poems on long walks, wrote them in a microscopic hand and, arriving at the office, gave them to his Miss Flynn to type. On Sunday he usually made a dinner of cold shrimps and celery. He was steeped in European culture, but not tempted to become an expatriate. He said: "It gives a man character as a poet to have a daily contact with a job. I doubt whether I ve lost a thing by leading an exceedingly regular and disciplined life." Again, he said: "Poetry and surety claims are not as unlikely a combination as they seem. There is nothing perfunctory about them, for each case is different." Stevens' life, as poet and lawyer and vice president, was to order the differences and the resemblances and the analogies. He was the American poet of shapes, and in the turmoil of his time there could be no more appropriate obsession for an American.

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