Wallace Stevens

An Introduction to Reading Wallace Stevens as a Poet of the Human Spirit

Wallace Stevens is one of the most perplexing of the major modern poets. His poetry, as even his most ardent admirers agree, is very difficult to follow, and his personal life cuts against the grain of commonplace beliefs about the lives of modern poets. Stevens was neither a bohemian, nor a drunk, nor a professor. In fact he was a successful insurance lawyer in Connecticut, and became a vice p...

William Wallace (1791-1837).

Wallace and Darwin

term the common ancestral state of members of a group); morphology (arguing that the “natural inference of an unprejudiced person” is to recognize that homologous structures “are true records of the progress of the organic world); domestication (maintaining that divergent animal breeds constitute evidence of mutability, and offering thought experiments to show that there is no good reason to th...

Wallace as writer

But despite their differences each man deeply valued the other. Darwin persuaded the British government to award Wallace a pension for services to science. Wallace dedicated his book The Malay Archipelago to Darwin, “as a token of personal esteem and friendship but also to express my deep admiration for his genius and his works.” Wallace also called his 1889 collection of evolutionary essays Da...

Alfred Russel Wallace , Ll

OF THE DISCUSSION. DB. MARTIN L. HOLBROOK: In listening to the able and interesting lecture of Prof. Cope, I could not help wishing that he had given us more detailed information about the personal life of Mr. Wallace. Knowledge of the personal characteristics of a writer often greatly helps us to an understanding of his thought and to a due appreciation of the value of his opinions. From a fri...