Beneath the surface of his cosmopolitan verse, an American heart beats, acknowledging attachments to Pennsylvania, Connecticut, his adopted state, and Florida, a vacation state. In "The Comedian as the Letter C" he wrote that "his soil is man's intelligence." Stevens was an heir of Walt Whitman, who employed free forms, foreign phrases, and references to music. Stevens's approximately 400 published poems and his few essays and published talks are largely devoted to converting the diversity of reality, its "fragrances" and "stinks," to poetry's order and harmony.
Stevens was born on Oct. 2, 1879, in Reading, Pa. He was educated locally and from 1897 to 1900 at Harvard, where he absorbed something of Professor George Santayana's estheticism. After college he worked briefly as a New York Herald Tribune reporter and attended New York University Law School (1900-1903). He was admitted to the bar in 1904 and began practicing law in New York City. He married Elsie V. Kachel in 1909 and they had one daughter. All the while he was writing poetry, and as the poetic renascence in America and England gathered momentum, he began to associate with other poets, such as Alfred Kreymborg, William Carlos Williams, E.
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