Wallace Stevens worked most of his professional life as an insurance executive, yet is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, winning a Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards. In a new biography, The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens (Simon & Schuster, 2016), University Professor of English Paul Mariani shows how, through his poetry, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime. “Wallace Stevens was a poet of the imagination. And for him, the imagination was the ultimate reality,” said Mariani, who has been called the “biographer of poets” for his previous volumes on Hart Crane, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell and John Berryman. More from the Boston College Chronicle.