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Growing up in Hartford, Connecticut, the writer Brendan Gill occasionally caught sight of an aloof, well-dressed insurance ex- ecutive by the name of Wallace Stevens. "He marched," Gill later recalled, "like a tame bear through the streets of our city, but there was nothing tamed about him; he had chosen to im- prison his fiercer self in a cage of upper-middle-class decorum as Frost had hidden himself inside a canny bumpkin." Stevens's "fiercer self" was busy...