Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: The Daily Poem
Episode: Wallace Stevens' "Of the surface of things"
Description: Stevens moved to Connecticut in 1916, having found employment at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., where he became vice president in 1934. He had also begun to establish an identity for himself outside the worlds of law and business. His first book of poems, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf), published in 1923, exhibited the influences of both the English Romantics and the French Symbolists, and demonstrated a wholly original style and sensibility: exotic, whimsical, and infused with the light and color of an Impressionist painting. Today’s poem comes from that early collection.For the next several years, Stevens focused on...