Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock
About this book
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. 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. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955."Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium, first published in 1915. The poem allows the reader to linger over the possibility of colors, strangeness and unusual dreams. Imagination that is absent from a mundane orderly life is represented by a dandified aesthete and an adventurous and exciting life by a drunken sailor dreaming of catching tigers in red weather. The poem's message is fairly simple. Stevens believed that poetry and literature in general had the ability to excite and inspire. He believed that the imagination was an overlooked tool with the innate capability of distinguishing a mundane life (i.e. the lives of those who wore 'white night gowns' to bed) from an exciting and fulfilling one. Essentially, he believed that the only limit on a person's life was a weak imagination.