
Insurance Man: The Life and Art of Wallace Stevens - kwindla
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-thrilling-mind-of-wallace-stevens
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kwindla
Wallace Stevens has always been my favorite poet, and also somehow a strange
counter-model to the modern "desk job" existence. He was an introvert who
worked a whole career as a mid-level executive. And he also created incredible
linguistic and philosophical gems, over and over, for thirty years. (Also, he
was first published at age fourty-four.)

The disconnection between going to work every day at Hartford Insurance, and
writing, say, this, is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking
about, and still find fundamentally mysterious:

    
    
        I do not know which to prefer,   
        The beauty of inflections   
        Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
        The blackbird whistling   
        Or just after.

