The Necessary Angel as Necessary Amateur: Poetics, Professionalism, and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Wallace Stevens was famously an amateur writer: an insurance executive who composed his poetry on the side, away from work. While this fact has often intrigued readers of Stevens's poetry, it also served as a basis for the dismissal of the poet's prose, mostly lectures delivered to academic audiences, as slight, desultory efforts by an untrained thinker. What made Stevens's prose anomalous in this regard, however, is precisely what renders it instructive today. As exemplified by "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," Stevens's prose is most fruitfully read as the reflexive record of a nonprofessional poet engaging with academic audiences, peculiarly attuned to how both literary criticism and poetry were being reshaped during the moment of their institutionalization.