Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He was a master stylist, employing an extraordinary vocabulary and a rigorous precision in crafting his poems. Because of the extreme technical and thematic complexity of his work, Stevens was sometimes considered a difficult poet. But he was also acknowledged as an eminent abstractionist and a provocative thinker. In 1975, for instance, noted literary critic Harold Bloom, whose writings on Stevens include the imposing Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, called him “the best and most representative American poet of our time.” His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut.