Wallace stevens was an insurance man. That he was also a poet seems odd; for nowadays around here poets and businessmen seldom agree. Their agreement in one person, in Hartford, Connecticut, is so strange that some, trying to account for it, have guessed it less agreement than uneasy split.

Whether an uneasy or an agreeable composite, Stevens commonly kept his sides apart and, in Hartford, kept one dark. At home, tending his roses in the evening, or in the morning walking to his office on Asylum Street, he jotted poems down — but never on company time. Poetry was none...