Wallace Stevens

Today is the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens (books by this author), born in Reading, Pennsylvania (1879). After going to law school he took a job with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and he worked there for the rest of his life. He walked two miles to and from work every day, and that's when he wrote his poems, scribbling notes on slips of paper and then giving them to his secretary to type up when he got to the office. Some people thought it was odd for an insurance man to write poetry. Stevens did not. He said, "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job."

He published his first collection, Harmonium (1923), when he was 43. Many of the poems in the collection have become classics, including "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird."