And then there was Wallace Stevens. In writing The Whole Harmonium, Paul Mariani, who has given us lives of Williams, Hart Crane, and Robert Lowell, set himself his most difficult challenge yet, for if ever there was a genius with a short biography, it was Stevens. The story that Mariani tells in 400 pages could be reduced, in its essentials, to 400 words. Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879 to a family of Pennsylvania Dutch descent. He went to Harvard, where he took literature classes and became the president of the literary magazine, The Advocate. But the need for a more substantial career than writing poetry led him to New York Law School. He married his first sweetheart, Elsie, and grew to dislike her; they had one child. In time they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he worked in the insurance business and rose to become the vice president of Hartford Accident and Indemnity. He never left North America. He was casually racist and anti-Semitic. A Hoover Republican, he distrusted labor unions. He drank too much at parties, to overcome his natural shyness, and later had to apologize for his boorishness. In the depths of the Depression, he made $20,000 a year, the equivalent of $350,000 today. Each detail feels more interest-repelling than the last. If such a man were the subject of a novel, it would be Babbitt.

“Wallace Stevens is beyond fathoming,” Marianne Moore wrote, comparing him to a person with “a morbid secret he would rather perish than disclose.” But the secret would out, and in his poems Stevens revealed it: The bluff American executive had a soul as baroque and fantastical as an aesthete’s, as profound and brooding as a philosopher’s. Imagine the surprise of Carl Van Vechten, the writer and literary impresario, who met Stevens for the first time in 1914, when this “big, blond, and burly” insurance man handed over the manuscript of “Peter Quince at the Clavier”:

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the self-same sounds

On my spirit make a music too. Music is feeling, then, not sound

And thus it is that what I feel

Here in this room, desiring you Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk

Is music.

This scene is not nearly as famous as the scene of T. S. Eliot showing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Ezra Pound, but the reader’s surprise must have been even greater: Stevens, like Eliot, had modernized himself. His first book, Harmonium, published in 1923, established Stevens as the patron saint of the inner life held captive by the outer life—a peculiarly American condition. His daily existence offered no scope for self-expression, but on his walks to and from work, in the evenings up in his study, he was confronting the ultimate questions of art and life. How can humanity live without God? Can religion be replaced with another kind of myth? How does art reflect and transcend reality? And he was answering in a language at once voluptuous and intellectual, elegant and eccentric—a language such as no one had spoken before: