Most readers of Wallace Stevens wonder at his `double life'; the poet and the lawyer who worked in the insurance business. But Longenbach argues that Stevens lived no such double life. By examining a full range of Stevens' writing in the context of American political and intellectual history, Longenbach's book reveals for the first time a poet who was not only aware of events taking place around him but whose work was often inspired by those events. While the focus is on Stevens, and the historical events and ideological debates around him, poets like Eliot, Williams, Marianne Moore, and Burke are also examined.