Wallace Stevens, vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and a Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry this year, died in St. Francis Hospital today. He was 75 years old. Mr. Stevens joined the local insurance company in 1916 as head of the Surety Claims Department. He was named a vice president in 1934. He also was a vice president of the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company. A native of Reading, Pa., Mr. Stevens attended Harvard and received a law degree from New York Law School. He is survived by his widow, Mrs. Elsie V. Kachel Stevens, and a daughter, Miss Holly B. Stevens, also of Hartford. Wallace Stevens was a weaver whose threads were words. He spun webs to trap his moods. Hence, unpleasant as it is to record such a conclusion, the very remarkable work of Wallace Stevens cannot endure, wrote Percy Hutchison, the late poetry editor of The New York Times. Mr. Hutchison had just reviewed the new edition of the poets Harmonium. That was in 1931, eight years after the volume first appeared. The poetry editor described the poems as closest to pure poetry. He explained that such works depended for their effectiveness on the rhythms and tonal values of words used with only the remotest link to ideational content.

Website: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/Stevens/obit.html