You may remember from some twenty years ago the PBS series titled Voices and Visions, which set about presenting documentaries of thirteen classic American poets—from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath. Not all the presentations are of equal value, though the one on Wallace Stevens is, I think, especially good. And its beginning, its opening interview, is especially revealing. The first interviewee is a salty old New Englander who worked with Stevens for many years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. You will recall that Stevens was an executive in and a lawyer for the company, his legal opinions themselves achieving a kind of rationalist poetry, and ranking as models of judgments. (And there is a picture, by the way, taken in 1938, of all the officers of the company posing as if graduating. In the picture, it is clear that Stevens’s reputation for intimidation of his colleagues is not based simply on an intellectual superiority; he literally towers, in height, over his fellows.) Anyway, the retired old fellow being interviewed starts off, in answer to the question, “What do you remember most about Wallace Stevens?” by saying, in one of those inimitable Connecticut Yankee accents: “Well, if you don’t count his personal life, I guess you could say Stevens was a happy man.”

The term personal comes, of course, from the same root as person, persona, and personality, all of which, at their base, hearken to the common sense of saving face, putting a face on, wearing a mask, and so forth. Yeats speaks of the poet—the first person of the poet—as revealing him- or herself only through the manifestation of the mask—perhaps, even, the manipulation of the mask: the way he, W. B. Yeats, personally, writes acutely from intense auto-biographic, ennobling experience, yet writes theatrically, too, as if he and Maud Gonne and Robert Gregory and whoever were dramatic personae or characters on the stage of the event we call a poem.