Wallace Stevens has always been my favorite poet, and also somehow a strange counter-model to the modern &quot;desk job&quot; existence. He was an introvert who worked a whole career as a mid-level executive. And he also created incredible linguistic and philosophical gems, over and over, for thirty years. (Also, he was first published at age fourty-four.)<p>The disconnection between going to work every day at Hartford Insurance, and writing, say, this, is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and still find fundamentally mysterious:<p><pre><code>    I do not know which to prefer,   
    The beauty of inflections   
    Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
    The blackbird whistling   
    Or just after.</code></pre>