Perhaps if I'd have read Wallace Stevens seriously (more than the Emperor of Ice Cream in an anthology), I would have gone to work selling insurance because I would have seen it as a viable 'day job' for an aspiring academic. To me though, teaching was the job of choice for those who wanted to pursue higher education, and business was for those who wanted only to pursue money. Two modernist luminaries, though, worked in the hurly burly of the business world, and produced some of the greatest writing of the twentieth century.
I had know something about TS Eliot and his work in banking, but I never equated his job with banality for the simple reason that he lived in London. 'Expatriate' banker somehow still seems revolutionary, non-conformist, and appropriate to a writer. But Wallace Stevens is unaccountable within my universe. He breaks stereotypes, and I enjoy the experience of having prejudices or biases questioned. It is not only that he is a poet and an Insurance Company Executive, but that he is an Insurance Company Executive, and writes amazing poetry.
I was not deeply interested in Stevens and thought I would just read a few of his poems from an anthology, but after my experience with Sunday Morning, I wanted to read everything he's written. So I bought a collection of his poems I found at Page One called The Palm at the End of the Mind
So far, several poems have made very strong impressions:
1) Sunday Morning. Apparently, when asked about this Poem Stevens replied it was a Pagan work, and I love that idea reading this. I can imagine a woman on a Sunday morning coping with the sudden rush of beauty from a moment, and then the let down of, "oh yes, but this is all temporary", and the diminished quality of comparing the earthly, physical world to the otherworldly, spiritual, divine. A dichotomy is set up dividing the material from the spiritual. Maybe there is a possible thematic connection to Frost's the Oven Bird. In fact, the idea of 'what to make of a diminished thing' may be a rhetorical question in Frost's work, but it is as if, in some way, Stevens answers the rhetorical question. And perhaps he answers it by saying, "this thing is only diminished if you are operating within a certain epistemological frame". How do we know that a beautiful. Sunday Morning isn't really the most important thing, and that a bird diving down in the present moment isn't just as real as an eternal form, beauty.
There is some suggestion that Matisse and Stevens are kindred spirits. I can really see the greens and the oranges in this painting by Matisse in much the same way that the poem's oranges an cockatoo are imaginable, though I think the kindred nature is more in the vision, the world view. Though, I don't know enough about Matisse to pretend to understand that.
2) Peter Quince at the Clavier is another very interesting poem, which draws on the biblical story of Susana, who was condemned to death, after she refused to succumb to some elders who had seen her bathing and pursued her. She is defended by Daniel who uses a series of puns to secure her safety and condemn the elders to death. The picture by Gentileschi is one of many paintings based on the Susana story.
I am struggling to comprehend the full weight of the possible inversion of Platonism which has been pointed to in this poem by critics. The idea that there is not ideal form of beauty, but only the transitory beauty existing in the mind. The challenge to Plato is in many ways a challenge to the foundations of modern Christianity in the same way that Sunday Morning challenges a world view dependent on the unseen, and somewhat suspicious of the seen, actual, material world, as corrupt, or at best devoid of truth.
3) The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem I am still coming to understand, and will look at it more closely during the fall term's independent study.
Again, I've just been struck by how much I love Steven's work, and again at the surprise at his position in the world seeming to be so out of step with my stereotype of 'the artist'. I like that about Stevens, and maybe my reading his work and my deep appreciation of it is that wonderful accident of finding a certain work or collection or artist at exactly the right time in life.
this afternoon (actually listened to the last part of it on tape; actually on CD; actually on my I-pod) while cooking meals for the week (pork chops with mango and cilantro, and tuna salad for sandwiches)... after a nap and while typing up notes on Long Day's Journey into Night, and Juno and the Paycock, I heard a clatter out on the lawn... springing from my computer. No, springing is not exactly it-- it was vexatious, no not really vexatious, but a desire nonetheless, a desire, that's how it might be said in a Faulkner novel, or perhaps it would be an ardor, or a hunger or a thirst, or some other such thing as might be said of a will brought about by a thought, or maybe it is the other way around, and I can only say that I heard some imperviously vexing, lugubrious resonance and moved from my place at the computer, and there, high in the old apple tree, with its eyes on me like I was a demon straight out of Sutpen's hundred-- there, up in the billowing, bending, pliancy of those branches was a Raccoon-- a salacious, determined, nocturnal, little creature, and it was ingratiating itself of my apples and it's kin-- another black-faced, ring tailed mammalian, acrobat-- was just scuttling about up the tree, over the wall and onto the shed. 
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