Published . Updated to add related reading links.
The man walking to work
For most of his adult life Wallace Stevens went to work at an insurance company. He had graduated from New York Law School in 1903 and passed the New York Bar the following year. In March 1916, at the age of thirty-six, he joined the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to oversee legal matters in its new fidelity and surety branch. He remained there until his death in 1955. By then he had become a vice president, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and written some of the strangest and most exhilarating poetry of the twentieth century.1
The contrast has proved irresistible. On one side stands the insurance executive, formally dressed, financially secure, signing business papers in an office at 690 Asylum Avenue. On the other stands the modernist poet, populating the world with blackbirds, blue guitars, gaudy parrots, jars in Tennessee and an emperor of ice cream. Stevens himself was large enough to accommodate both figures. As a young man he was six foot two, blond and broad. Carl Van Vechten called him a “dainty rogue in porcelain,” which Walter Arensberg promptly improved to “a rogue elephant in porcelain.” In later life he was still imposing: heavy without being ponderous, with close-cropped grey hair, a soft voice and a hearty laugh that could be heard down the company corridor.
From a distance, the two careers can look almost completely separate. Stevens rarely discussed poetry with his business associates, and to most people in Hartford he was known primarily as a successful insurance lawyer. Only later in his life did the poet acquire the wider recognition that is now inseparable from his name.
His professional life was substantial in its own right. In 1934 he was promoted to vice president and paid $20,000 a year, an exceptionally high income during the Depression. Two years earlier, he and his wife, Elsie, had bought their house at 118 Westerly Terrace for cash. His insurance career allowed him the comfortable life he plainly valued, with books, paintings, good food and wine.
But the separation is more apparent than real. The words did not wait politely until office hours ended. Stevens often composed while walking to and from work, carrying scraps of paper on which he noted phrases and ideas for his secretary to type later. From the apartment on Farmington Avenue where the family lived after the birth of his daughter, Holly, the walk to the office was about two miles along a busy road filled with cars, trucks and trolleys. Neither Stevens nor Elsie ever learned to drive. Later, from Westerly Terrace, walking remained part of the measure of his days.2
This was not quite the Romantic poet wandering alone through pristine nature. Stevens walked through Hartford on his way to a highly paid and demanding job. The work gave him security, authority and routine.
That routine sometimes felt imprisoning. As a young man in New York he complained that his days had become a “monotonous Odyssey” and wrote that most people lived excessively ordered lives, moving in the same groove day after day.
This is where the two lives begin to meet. The office, the repeated walk, the house, the seasons and the daily return to the same streets were not merely the backdrop to the poetry. They formed part of the ordinary world whose deadening and renewal Stevens examined again and again.
Few poets seem less boring on the page. Stevens is sensuous, philosophical and funny. His verse can turn from metaphysics to weather, from a pineapple to an angel, from grave abstraction to a verbal pratfall. Even his titles seem designed to wake the language up: “The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress (CP 64)
What, then, does any of this have to do with boredom?
More than we might expect. Boredom in Stevens is not simply the dull interval from which a colourful poem provides relief. It is one of the recurrent conditions under which his poetry begins.
A garden too full
“Banal Sojourn,” an early poem collected in Harmonium, begins with colour. Blue hydrangeas stand in wooden tubs beneath stone steps. The sky is streaked with rose, the trees are black, and grackles crack their “throats of bone” in the smooth air. Almost every object arrives already charged with pigment, texture or sound. If boredom means a shortage of impressions, this is not boredom.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,
…One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady. (CP 62–63)
But the impressions do not remain distinct. Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a “slum of bloom.” The phrase is lush and ugly at once. Bloom, the conventional emblem of natural beauty, has become congestion. Summer is a “fat beast” sleeping in mildew: green, bloated and serenely oppressive. Nothing is missing. That is precisely the trouble. The world has filled itself until one sensation can no longer separate itself from the next.
Stevens’s language behaves differently from the summer it describes. The speaker produces a mock-French exclamation and comic grotesques. A princox appears in the evening heaven; wigs despoil a Satanic ear. The diction refuses the torpor it names. The poem is already creating its way through paralysis, making theatrical comedy from humidity and disgust. Its verbal quickness becomes the first counterforce to the swollen scene.
Still, no flourish releases the speaker. He longs for an “unfuzzed” sky, for a line of sight beyond the green shade at the bottom of the land. The desire anticipates a recurrent movement in Stevens: away from an overgrown or inherited world and towards cold, whiteness, bareness or abstraction. Something must be removed before anything can be seen freshly. Yet “Banal Sojourn” does not reach that clearing. It ends by repeating a diagnosis: one has a malady here; one feels it.
This is an important beginning because it prevents us from identifying boredom with emptiness. Stevens can be bored by a world that contains too much. What has disappeared is not material but difference. The senses continue to receive impressions, yet the impressions no longer reorganise attention. Stimulation has become climate.
The malady of the everyday
In “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” the sickness receives its famous name. The speaker suffers from “the malady of the quotidian”: the illness of the everyday. Summer mildew and deepening snow have become alike within the routine he knows. The seasons still change, but change no longer makes a difference.
The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know. (CP 96)
The poem imagines a possible cure in winter. Perhaps cold could penetrate colour and reach a “final slate.” Perhaps it could strip the scene back far enough for new speech, “new orations of the cold,” to begin. The word orations gives winter a voice at the moment the human pharynx falters. What the speaker cannot say might be said by a cleansed world.
Yet the grammar remains conditional. One might find such a clearing. One might. Time, however, will not relent. The repetition of possibility does not turn it into an event. The poem wants a zero point but cannot command one. It knows the desire to escape routine and distrusts the fantasy that a different season will do the work for us.
The first emergence of a poem is therefore neither pure passivity nor controlled production. Stevens made himself available. He read, looked, walked and listened. He did not fill every interval in advance. The distinction becomes clearer in one of his most compressed and demanding poems, where the effort to receive the world requires the mind to empty itself almost completely.
The mind of winter
“The Snow Man” consists of a single sentence. Its grammar carries the reader through winter branches, junipers, spruces, wind and snow towards one of Stevens’s most famous endings. To behold the winter scene without projecting human misery into it, the listener must possess a “mind of winter,” must have been cold for a long time, and must become “nothing himself.” Only then might he perceive both the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. (CP 10)
The poem therefore approaches a zero point without pretending that it can occupy a position outside perception. It brackets the familiar meanings of winter: sadness, death, loneliness, picturesque beauty. What remains is not raw reality delivered without mediation. It is a disciplined relation to reality, created through syntax, sound and attention. The listener hears the wind without hearing it as personal lament.
“The Snow Man” also reveals why the zero point cannot be the final aim of poetry. A consciousness that became wholly nothing would not write. The poem can approach the threshold only because language remains intensely active. The clearing matters as a moment within creation, not as a permanent state. In Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens gives this movement a larger vocabulary: celestial ennui, abstraction, the first idea and the changing fiction through which the world becomes fluent again.
Celestial ennui
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction is an imposing title with a modest first word. These are notes toward the supreme fiction, not the fiction itself. The poem proceeds through three imperatives: it must be abstract, it must change, and it must give pleasure. Yet each apparent rule is tested and complicated by the cantos that follow. Stevens is not issuing a settled philosophy. He is staging the education of a poet whom he calls the ephebe.
Early in the poem, he announces the movement that concerns us: the “celestial ennui of apartments” sends us back to the first idea. The line contains the argument in miniature. The apartments make its abstraction domestic: enclosed, familiar rooms become an image for a mind surrounded by inherited forms and classifications that no longer animate what they organise. The first idea names the possibility of loosening what has become settled and beginning again.
It is the celestial ennui of apartments
That sends us back to the first idea, the quick
Of this invention; (CP 381)
What is the first idea? Stevens does not mean a recoverable historical moment, as if we could excavate the first human perception. The first idea is “an imagined thing.” It is the idea of the world before inherited descriptions have finished with it, before the sun has acquired all the names and meanings through which it ordinarily appears. The ephebe must become ignorant again and perceive with an ignorant eye. Even the sun, Stevens says, must bear no name.
The ignorance is cultivated, not innocent. No adult reader can simply forget language, history and previous poems. The first idea must therefore be produced through abstraction. The mind removes, brackets or loosens what has become automatic. But the resulting origin is itself imagined. The zero point is never discovered as a thing lying behind appearances. Poetry creates the fiction of beginning from which another relation to appearances becomes possible.
This is the conceptual hinge of the argument. Boredom in Stevens can be understood as a crisis in the relation between subject and world. Because established meanings no longer animate reality, the subject experiences separation. Yet the same exhaustion may clear a space in which perception and imagination can begin differently. Boredom is “positive” only in this limited and conditional sense. It is not pleasant, and it does not contain creativity like a seed. Its possibility depends on what happens to it.3
Stevens’s prose sharpens the point. In “The Irrational Element in Poetry” he observes that scholars would shrivel with boredom if confined to the known. The unknown excites their ardour. He also writes that “one grows tired of the monotony of one’s imagination” and sets out to find variety. Both claims matter. Reality is not inherently boring, and imagination is not an inexhaustible antidote. An imaginative style can harden into habit as readily as an office routine. The problem, then, is not simply to escape routine but to prevent imagination itself from becoming routine.4
That is why Notes places change at the centre of the supreme fiction. Any successful fiction risks becoming another apartment. Religious myths, philosophical systems and poetic vocabularies may once have joined human beings to the world; repeated without living force, they separate us from it. A supreme fiction would have to acknowledge its fictional status and remain capable of alteration. It would not abolish reality but change our relation to it, knowing that its own forms would eventually require change.7
Near its end, Notes enters “my green, my fluent mundo.” The mixture of English and Spanish makes the world sound at once intimate and newly foreign. Mundo is not a private dream replacing the actual world. It is the world rendered fluent through renewed relation: green, moving and susceptible to further transformation. The journey from celestial ennui does not finish in a final concept. It returns us to a world in motion.
I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo.
You will have stopped revolving except in crystal. (CP 407)
Siobhan Phillips has helped make the temporal character of this movement clearer. In her account of Stevens and everyday repetition, the first idea is not one immaculate origin reached once in a poetic lifetime. Phillips draws here on Stevens’s own phrase, “original earliness … is a daily sense.” Each day may reopen the possibility of beginning, just as each day may subside into routine. The movement from boredom through abstraction to renewed contact is therefore cyclical rather than heroic. Monotony returns, and so must attention.5
Phillips’s account also suggests a way of reading Stevens’s working life. The repeated walk to the office was not merely time taken away from poetry; it may also have been one of the daily intervals in which a familiar world could be heard differently. The route remained the same; the rhythms and words did not have to.
Why purity is not enough
In “The Poems of Our Climate,” a bowl of pink and white carnations stands in a room of white, surrounded by snowy air and clear water. The scene seems to have achieved the purification desired in the earlier poems. Greenness, mildew and oppressive abundance have been removed. The world is cool, spare and nearly abstract.
For a moment, this appears to be paradise. The carnations are contained within a crystalline arrangement whose colours barely disturb the white. Yet the mind cannot remain satisfied. Even if the self were cleansed in such a world, the poem says, one would still want and need more:
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise. (CP 194)
The poem therefore complicates the notion of positive boredom. If boredom clears a space by exhausting familiar forms, the cleared space must not become another sterile ideal. The mind needs resistance, imperfection and difference. It needs a world that does not wholly coincide with its designs. Otherwise the first idea would become the last idea, fixed and immaculate, another form of monotony.6
The movement is not from bad boredom to good imagination. Boredom, abstraction and imagination can each become stagnant. What matters is the relation among them and the ability to move. The zero point is valuable because it interrupts an exhausted order; it becomes harmful when treated as a home.
The imagined absence
In the late poem “The Plain Sense of Things,” the leaves have fallen. The return of plainness is seasonal and recurrent: the poem begins with the sense that we have arrived here before. A greenhouse stands in need of paint. A great pond lies beyond it, its water like dirty glass. The elaborate vocabulary of the first idea and supreme fiction has receded. What remains looks ordinary, depleted and stubbornly material.
The poem eventually states the paradox directly: the absence of imagination had itself to be imagined. This sentence completes the movement begun in “The Snow Man.” Consciousness cannot simply step outside itself to encounter a world untouched by imagination. The attempt to represent absence gives absence a form. The zero point folds back into the faculty that sought it.
Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence (CP 503)
That recognition does not turn the pond into a triumph of mind. The water stays dirty, the structure remains ruined, and the season offers no easy rebirth. Stevens does not reveal that imagination secretly dominates everything. He shows that world and imagination cannot be cleanly separated, even when their relation feels exhausted. Plainness is not the world with poetry removed. It is one of poetry’s most austere achievements.
This restraint matters. A cheerful modern appropriation might turn Stevens into an advocate of scheduled boredom: stare at a wall, become creative. The poems resist that lesson. Sometimes the malady remains a malady. The pharynx does not recover on command. The pond stays like dirty glass. There are forms of boredom bound up with loneliness, depression or despair that cannot responsibly be celebrated as hidden opportunities.
Stevens’s narrower insight is more convincing. When a relation to the world has become automatic, its collapse may be the beginning of another relation. Whether that possibility develops depends on attention, time and the work of imagination.
The same world
Stevens never found a way out of repetition. Nor, finally, did he seem to want one. Decades later he could say that he still did “exactly the same thing day after day” at work and was happy to be doing it. He went to the same office, walked many of the same streets and watched the same seasons return. What changed was not necessarily the world but his relation to it.
This may be one of the quiet achievements of his poetry. A life can be comfortable, repetitive, even at times monotonous, without being exhausted. The familiar can become dead through habit, but it can also become strange again. For Stevens, that renewal required more than novelty. It required allowing an old order to loosen before replacing it with another one.
Boredom matters here because it is one of the moments in which that loosening can occur. It is not valuable in itself, and there is no guarantee that anything will come of it. But if the impulse to escape it is resisted for a while, the world may begin to lose the names and expectations that have made it invisible. Something simpler, barer and less settled can emerge.
That possibility may be harder to preserve now. An empty moment can easily be interrupted before it develops into anything else. The interruption may be pleasant, useful or harmless; the point is not to condemn it. But Stevens suggests that some forms of renewal depend precisely on not being rescued too quickly from monotony.
He spent a lifetime returning to this problem: how to inhabit the same world without allowing it to become merely the same. The answer was never a final image or a permanent state of freshness. It was the willingness to let familiar forms wear out, to endure for a time the emptiness they leave behind, and to allow what remains to be seen otherwise.
The world does not have to become new. What Stevens spent a lifetime discovering was how the same world might begin again.
Notes
1. For the biographical outline and quotations in the opening and final sections, see Paul Mariani, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), pp. 32, 56, 74–75, 143, 152, 237, 251, 332. Mariani documents the “monotonous Odyssey” of Stevens’s early New York working life; his March 1916 appointment to oversee the Hartford’s new fidelity and surety branch; the 1932 cash purchase of 118 Westerly Terrace; his promotion and $20,000 salary; contemporary descriptions of his physical presence; and his later remark that he continued to do “exactly the same thing day after day” at work and was happy to do it.
2. Mariani, p. 136, describes the two-mile walk from 735 Farmington Avenue to the Hartford office and Stevens’s habit of carrying scraps of paper for phrases and ideas. On walking, rhythm, music, and the formation of poems, see also Lisa Goldfarb, “The Whispering of Innumerable Responsive Spirits: Stevens’ New York Music,” in Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism, ed. Lisa Goldfarb and Bart Eeckhout (Routledge, 2012).
3. The account of boredom as a crisis in the relation between subject and world, and of the zero point as a possible opening for renewed imagination, develops the argument of my MA thesis, Den positive kedsomhed: Anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb. Heidegger – Stevens – Leth (University of Copenhagen, 2005), now available in English as Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom — Heidegger, Stevens, Leth (2026), chapter 3.
4. See Wallace Stevens, “The Irrational Element in Poetry” and “Two or Three Ideas,” in Opus Posthumous, rev. ed., ed. Milton J. Bates (Vintage Books, 1989). In “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” section VI (p. 276), Stevens says that one reason for writing is that “one grows tired of the monotony of one’s imagination” and sets out to find variety; in section IX (p. 283), the unknown keeps scholars from “shrivel[ing] up with boredom.” In “Two or Three Ideas” (p. 342), he writes that the poet “denies that reality was ever monotonous except in comparison.”
5. Siobhan Phillips, The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse (Columbia University Press, 2010), chapter 2, “The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens,” p. 85. Phillips’s account of creative repetition draws on Stevens’s own phrase “original earliness” as “a daily sense” in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and is especially useful for understanding renewal as recurrent rather than final.
6. Edward Ragg, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction (Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially his discussion of “The Poems of Our Climate.” Ragg stresses that abstraction is not access to a reality cleansed of imagination but a changing way of composing a relation to it.
7. Adalaide Kirby Morris, Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith (Princeton University Press, 1974), offers a related account of living imaginative forms becoming fixed into dead forms or dogma; this helps clarify why even a successful fiction must remain capable of change.
Sources and Further Reading
Abe, Masahiko. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetic of Boredom. PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996.
Goldfarb, Lisa, and Bart Eeckhout, eds. Wallace Stevens, New York, and Modernism. Routledge, 2012.
Mariani, Paul. The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens. Simon and Schuster, 2016.
Morris, Adalaide Kirby. Wallace Stevens: Imagination and Faith. Princeton University Press, 1974.
Phillips, Siobhan. The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Ragg, Edward. Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.
Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Vintage Books, 1976.
Stevens, Wallace. Opus Posthumous. Revised, enlarged, and corrected edition. Edited by Milton J. Bates. Vintage Books, 1989.
Wichmann, Jonathan. Den positive kedsomhed: Anslag til et nyt kedsomhedsbegreb. Heidegger – Stevens – Leth. MA thesis, University of Copenhagen, 2005. Complete English translation and new edition published in 2026 as Positive Boredom: Towards a New Concept of Boredom — Heidegger, Stevens, Leth.
Read this essay as a PDF here.
Related reading
This essay grows out of the Stevens discussion in Positive Boredom. For the broader philosophical argument, read Can Boredom Be Positive? or the Danish essay Kan kedsomhed være positiv?.