Wallace Stevens
The Emperor of Ice Cream (Wallace Stevens) Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania in the year 1879, and died 76 years later in Connecticut. ... It is said that Stevens had a two lives: an ordinary life and an extraordinary life. ... Even though appreciated by his contemporaries, Stevens felt discouraged by the reviews of his book and wrote nothing through the 20’s. ... At age sixty, when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves, Stevens had his best writing ahead of him in the form of extended meditative sequences, semi-philosophical but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and an inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples.