Wallace Stevens, the renowned American Modernist poet, spent most of his life working as a lawyer at an insurance executive. He wrote poetry privately and suggested the dependency of nature on our perception to establish any meaning and value, as well as the imagination’s limitations.

Exploring the role of a poet in tracing “the resemblances between things” in his essay, “The Realm of Resemblances” Stevens wrote,

Take, for example, a beach extending as far as the eye can reach bordered on the one hand, by trees and, on the other, by the sea. The sky is cloudless and the sun is red. In what sense do the objects in this scene resemble each other? There is enough green in the sea to relate it to the palms. There is enough sky reflected in the water to create a resemblance, in some sense, between them. The sand is yellow between the green and the blue. In short, the light alone creates a unity not only in the recedings of distance, where differences become invisible, but also in the contacts of closer sight. So, too, sufficiently generalized, each man resembles all other men, each woman resembles all other women, this year resembles last year. The beginning of time will, no doubt, resemble the end of time. One world is said to resemble another.