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Wallace Stevens Where He Lived

Stephen Burt

ELH, Volume 77, Number 2, Summer 2010, pp. 325-352 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/elh.0.0085

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325ELH 77 (2010) 325–352 © 2010 The Johns Hopkins Universit Press

WALLACE STEVENS: WHERE HE LIVEDby STEPHEN bURT

“Li e is an a air o people not o places,” Wallace Stevens wrote.“but or me it is an a air o places and that is the trou le.”1 His readershave sometimes asked which places, and wh . One critic even claimsthat he “never wrote an thing without recourse to a speci c place,” asi his locales served, or Stevens, the same generative unction as his

titles.2

Taken literall , the proposition seems a surd: what real islandprovides the home or Captain bawda? Stevens’s poems are primaril imaginative constructions, not literal records o externall veri a leevents, places and times. yet acts a out real sites that Stevens knew well (some o them noted no earlier critic) in orm Stevens’s works,especiall in the deli eratel plain poems o his nal ears.3 Stevens

rought his Connecticut into his works o art partl through his ar-rangements o grammar and sound, and partl through matters o localhistor , regional lore, and even ur an planning.4 Much-noted studieso Stevens’s political alignments claim to correct earlier views o thepoet as wholl inattentive to pu lic li e: those studies have proven most

ruit ul or Stevens’s work o the 1930s and earl 1940s (which theirauthors usuall pre er) than or the poems he wrote later on.5 A wideenough view o pu lic li e, one that includes not onl campaigns andelections ut also the varied uses o pu lic space, might expand what we can see in his latest poems. To read the late poems in the lighto Stevens’s Connecticut is to see one more source or their sadnessand their consolations, one more model or their ver al powers. It isalso to see how that work can speak to recent de ates a out literatureand geograph , literature and the environment, and literature and thehuman od .

******

Stevens’s interest in places spanned his career, ut his attitudestowards particular places changed. “The Comedian As the Letter C”(1922) egins with the claim, “Man is the intelligence o his soil,”then ollows its “poetic hero” Crispin on journe s through Southern

or tropical New World places; Crispin’s Northern “realist” household



326 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

and amil , the end o the narrative poem, ma make him at last a“pro tless / Philosopher,” or end his poetic career (CPP, 29, 32, 37).Through the 1930s, Stevens’s verse o ten marks its places as Southern

or Northern, with contrasts etween lush ut alien ertilit and leakut amiliar da -to-da li e in a “North . . . o wintr slime,” even o “academic death” (CPP, 98, 89). During the 1940s, as he pursuedgenealogical research, Stevens o ten mentioned the region aroundReading, Penns lvania, where he grew up. When the distinguishedStevens scholar and editor Milton bates writes o “Stevens as RegionalPoet,” the region is southeastern Penns lvania: Thomas Lom ardi hassince devoted a ook to Stevens’s Penns lvania roots.6 yet Stevens’spostwar letters track, i not a disa ection with genealog , a detach-

ment rom the place where he grew up: “When one has le t home theplace naturall changes. What I had not realized” until returning toReading in 1946 (he told Judge Powell) “is that it keeps changing until. . . the old amiliar li e o it is dead and gone.”7 Not Penns lvania utConnecticut had ecome his locale.

Though Stevens egan to use New England place names as earl as Harmonium, onl later did he learn to make whole poems romsu tler, and rom more welcoming, reactions to the places where he worked and lived. While the late poems have attracted super com-mentar since their pu lication, cele rations o how Stevens “dwelt inConnecticut”—except or a ew anal ses o “An Ordinar Evening inNew Haven”—have not o ten drawn convincing connections etweenindividual poems and New England sites, digressing instead intoHeideggerian metaph sics or literar histor .8 yet in his late attentionto places in Connecticut, and in his nal conception o Connecticutas experience and idea (the sel -iron in that phrase ts the poems),Stevens ecame the regional poet that he once wanted Crispin to e.Particular late poems draw on acts and impression o pu lic places,especiall , ut no means onl , within Eliza eth Park in Hart ord.The qualities that the older Stevens sometimes let himsel cherish—thinness, dailiness, routine, a straction—as properl in and o Con-necticut, properl his own, were the qualities he once saw as inimicalto poetr , the qualities that threatened to prevent the mature Crispin

rom writing at all.9

******

The last poems, Eleanor Cook explains, “are poems o eing at

home et also o seeking home.”10

yet “Stevens was a man without a



327Stephen Burt

home,” as Helen Vendler writes; “he made a home instead rom . . .Eliza eth Park and the Connecticut River.”11 Designed etween 1894and 1897 the rm o Frederick Law Olmsted (with his adopted son

John Olmsted taking the lead), Eliza eth Park was part o the much-pu licized “Rain o Parks” that changed the appearance o Hart ordat the turn o the twentieth centur : it was “one o the most heavil used parks in the cit ” when Wallace and Elsie Stevens purchased ahome near in 1932.12 Stevens not onl walked through Eliza ethPark to and rom his o ce ut “spent hours there, on weekends,composing his poetr .”13 Eliza eth Park, Stevens told bar ara Churchin 1952, “is almost all there is in Hart ord and I like it especiall onSunda s when people go there” ( L, 761). In 1953 he saw “plants o

heath . . . in ull loom,” “notwithstanding the two reezing nights thathad covered the pond with ice several inches thick”: its estive plantli e and its place in the li e o the cit could make it an em lem orplangenc or or plent , or survival or or leak conditions, in winterand in spring ( L, 805).

That description echoes “The Plain Sense o Things,” a poem thatitsel echoes the park’s histor .14 This poem egins “as i / We had cometo an end,” and ever thing in it appears to e alling down:

The great structure has ecome a minor house.No tur an walks across the lessened foors.The greenhouse never so adl needed paint.The chimne is t ears old and slants to one side.A antastic e ort has ailed, a repetitionIn a repetitiousness o men and fies.

(CPP, 428)

Stevens sets out to show that what looks like “an inert savoir,” a placein the mind that seems entirel hostile to all jo , to all imaginative

guration, and to all the mind’s attempts to rise a ove the world asgiven, can ecome the ground or such attempts: the zero degree o imagination remains enough, rightl seen, to lock despair. “The greatpond, / The plain sense o it,” Stevens decides (repeating the nounphrase “great pond”), “The great pond and its waste o the lilies, allthis / Had to e imagined as an inevita le knowledge, / Required, asa necessit requires” (CPP, 428).

With its “plainness” o diction (no unusual words and no oreign words except “savoir”; no ver s o action, save “come,” a ter the mid-point o the poem), “The Plain Sense o Things” derives power instead

rom its grammar. The rst twelve lines, the case or desolation, turn




on present and present per ect ver s (“have allen,” “return,” “hasecome,” “walks,” “slants”), interrupted onl a gloom su junctive

construction (“It is as i / We had come to an end”). The last eight, with

their attempt at amor fati, repeat a preterite instead, even reakinglines (twice) to emphasize the past tense “had”: “the a sence o theimagination had / To e imagined,” “all this / Had to e imagined.”The poem rides, also, on its repeated adjectives, moving rom “plain”to “ lank” to “great,” rom “great” to “plain” to “great” (used withsome iron ) to “inevita le.” The adjectives and the ver tenses tellthe same stor : the poet despairs as he aces a wintr , ailed, deca ingpresent, and then renders that present tolera le envisioning it asa possi le uture that must have een aced and accepted alread

someone some time ago.That stor refects what the poet saw in Eliza eth Park, and whathe pro a l knew a out its histor . The park contains all the eaturesthat Stevens descri es: greenhouses, a “great structure” intended orcele rations (the Pond Estate House), a pond, and gardens o annualand perennial fora, including lilies (see gure 1).15 The greenhouses—erected in the 1890s, and as old as the park itsel —pro a l did needpaint the earl 1950s (the received their rst important renova-tions in 2005). And the Pond Estate House adl needed repairs: in

act, it would soon e torn down. built in 1846, the house egan asthe home o Charles Pond, who equeathed the land that ecame thepark. b 1952, “the foor sagged, and patrons complained o a must smell,” and “the deterioration o the house made it less and less at-tractive.”16 Structural faws ound in March orced the cit to stoprenting the uilding out or parties (thus “no tur an walks across thelessened foors”). George Hollister, the Superintendent o Parks, toldthe Cit Manager in April 1952 that he wanted the structure razed,declaring, “I am sure that the Eliza eth Park Pond House has outlivedits use ulness”; the uilding, he added, was “ ast ecoming a lia ilit and extensive repairs are needed to put it into sa e condition.”17 Theshuttered edi ce made news (even ront-page news) repeatedl overthe ollowing ear, as the Cit Council de ated whether or not to de-stro it: “Ma e what Hart ord needs is a bo Moses,” theCourant editorialized, chillingl , in April 1953.18

b. J. Leggett sees in “The Plain Sense o Things” a berkele anargument or some inhuman creative o server (since the leaves, thestructure, and the rest “had to e imagined”).19 Even i we reject thisargument (which casts the poem, and late Stevens generall , in a sur-prising light o religious orthodox ), we might nd in the same poem



329Stephen Burt

questions a out ur an planning in winter-prone regions. “The a senceo the imagination,” the eventual collapse o the park (as o all humanmakings) into entropic, nearl indescri a le plainness, “had / Itsel to

e imagined” e orehand. Stevens’s passive construction does not sa who had to imagine the plainness, nor how long ago. The poet ma there ring in the men who planned the park: John Olmsted, thedesigner, i not Charles Pond, the donor, must have considered howthe park with its pond, trees, Estate House, and gaze o would lookdecades hence, as its structures started to crum le, as well as how it would look in drear-nighted Decem er, a ter the last lea la on theic ground.

We might not think Stevens had seen Hart ord in this wa i hehad not also written “Postcard rom the Volcano,” with its “dirt housein a gutted world” whose quondam glories uture “children . . . willnever know” (CPP, 128). As it is, “The Plain Sense o Things” seesthe wintr , mudd park as a Pompeii in the making, the Pond EstateHouse as a uture “a andoned mansion” (CPP, 128). To readers with

Figure 1. Map o Eliza eth Park, Hart ord, CT. Source: The Friends o Eliza ethPark, http://www.eliza ethpark.org/map_o _park.htm




special interests in ur an histor (i to no others), the poem ma eveneel proleptic, or anachronistic, in that it predicts the ailure o ur an

parks to humanize and keep attractive the core o an American cit

rom which industr has departed.20

yet it would, o course, e wrongto reduce an good poem to an account o the circumstances o itsorigin, let alone a conjectural account. And it would e wrong to see“The Plain Sense o Things,” a poem a out “sadness” and disappoint-ment in general, merel as a poem a out one park. We can sa insteadthat Eliza eth Park and its histor let Stevens write a out repetitionand originalit , creation and deca , as topics that arose in one place,at one time.21

I “The Plain Sense o Things” is a poem o Eliza eth Park, then

“Vacanc in the Park,” “The Hermitage at the Center,” and “NunsPainting Water Lilies” all ecome its companion poems. “Nuns Painting Water Lilies” (1950) grew rom the poet’s o servation: “Whenever Isaw” the nuns in the park, Stevens told the pious Thomas McGreev in August 1948, “I thought o the chasteness o things” (L, 610). Thesenuns (who will not ear children o their own) resem le the “pods” onthe lilies in that oth “are part o the growth o li e within li e”—waterlilies, not the lilies o Easter: depicting the “feurettes” (and orrow-ing vigorousl rom French), the nuns ecome “part o a raicheur,”a spring, which their chastit renders otherwise “inaccessi le” (CPP,456).22 “The Hermitage at the Center” (1952) includes not onl theuses other visitors ound or the park, ut also its design. Eliza ethPark was known (like the boston Pu lic Garden) or its processions o ducks: when Stevens would “sit on a ench the pond” with PeterLee, the poet recalled in 1954, Lee “did not wait or the ducks to ringhim ideas” (CPP, 873). The poem includes oth the ducks, and thegaze o in the rose garden, situated at the center o a wheel-shapedplan o paths whose trellised “spokes” extended outwards into a “ring”(CPP, 430). An o server at the center o the Rose Garden would ea le to watch multiple simultaneous events—one source, perhaps, or what Cook ( ollowing Vendler) calls its “intertwined dou le line” o argument, with a “ ugal” unison at the end.23

The poem incorporates not onl the architecture in the garden, which made such simultaneous o servations possi le, ut also themultiple gures that Stevens o serves. At the opening o the poem,“The leaves on the macadam make a noise” (the word “macadam,” inHart ord at this time, would have connoted a cit park).24 The leaves’noise suggests entrop , “a great thing tottering”; the other presences inthe park, however—at rst the reclining odalisque, “the desired,” and



331Stephen Burt

then the irds who pa her tri ute, the “lucent children,” along withthe ducks the eed— ield a complementar principle o renewal, sothat the poem juxtaposes (in Vendler’s words) “the dail impersonal

newness o the visi le world” with the knowledge that all things willsomeda grow old and cease.25 Stevens’s unusual dou le-columnedsentences, and his unusual indentations (the asis or a whole serieso two-columned poems the contemporar poet Greg Williamson)here suggest a spoke-and-wheel structure: the composition descri es a“ring” with a “hermitage” (perhaps remem ering “Crispin as hermit”)at its core, a temporar shelter rom which the poet himsel can seethe woman listening to the irds, and hear the “tintinna ula” o naturaland human sound (CPP, 32, 430).26

“The Hermitage” allows its three-line stanzas to end onl once it hasincluded, like the Sphinx’s riddle, all three asic stages o li e: “chil-dren,” amorous adulthood (“the desired”), and old age, which looks,as rom a crooked tripod, at the other two. The Eliza eth Park poems,considered as a group, show (to quote a chillier, earlier poem) “This AsIncluding That”; the suggest that Stevens calls into eing or himsel and or an imagined readers a kind o gurative ur an park, a spaceanalogous in imagination not to his house ut to his Hart ord, and aspace designed (like all success ul cit parks, and in contradistinctionto private houses) or multiple simultaneous uses, people o di -

erent ages and tastes (CPP, 594).27 We might even sa that Stevenssponsors and makes, as he “wanted to make,” in ver al imagination, aspace with its fora and its shelters almost as Charles Pond sponsored,and John Olmsted planned, a cit park (CPP, 473).

“Vacanc in the Park” (1952) ecomes the last poem in an Eliza ethPark sequence: its sense o terminus provides one reason Stevensplaced it a ter “The Plain Sense o Things” when he arrangedThe Rock,though he pro a l wrote “Vacanc ” months earlier.28 Here Stevens,the man who walks across the park in March, also looks ack throughhis own writing li e. “Looking or he knows not what,” he compareshis quest, or else its o ject, to a vanished oat (an echo o “Prologuesto What Is Possi le”), to a lost guitar (as in “The Man with the blueGuitar,” and in “Farewell Without a Guitar”), and then to a “ eeling,”“the eeling o a man / Come ack to see a certain house,” who ound just a “rustic ar or” in its stead (CPP, 434, 437, 135, 461). Not the oat,nor the guitar, ut the eeling o the returning man matches the eelingo the man in the park, ecause oth men encounter the remains orthe ruined skeleton o the place that the had hoped to nd—a placeassociated, moreover, with weddings, which took place regularl , in warm weather, at the gaze o and around the trellises.29




What horri es Stevens in this saddest o his Connecticut poems isthat the experience o this park, where he expected consolation, lookstoo much like the experience o revisiting Reading, and too much

like the experience o coming home to an uncomprehending spouse.Stevens had hoped earlier that the “wild poem” might “su stitute / For the woman one loves or ought to love,” and the disappointmentso domestic li e nd reinvigoration in his imaginative remakings o places elsewhere (CPP, 219). In this poem all such hopes drain awa .The “rustic ar or” in this pu lic park is neither a site or pastoralcourtship (like the remem ered pagoda o another late poem) nor anappropriate su stitute or a private house. It is too much like a privatehouse, ar too much like a edroom, and in the wrong wa s: the winds

low “under” and through its imagined ed, “Under its mattresses o vines” (CPP, 435; emphasis added).30 “Vacanc ” is a leak poem, athome nowhere (with the additional suggestion o real estate vacanc :the gaze o is unoccupied, so that someone else can move in, or getmarried, there). yet it also shows how thoroughl Stevens, in this parki not in his own house, expected to eel at home.

Not all the Hart ord poems involve the park. Cook has shown how“St. Armorer’s Church rom the Outside” “reads” the Church o theGood Shepherd, a Victorian Gothic structure on W ll s Street inHart ord (CPP, 448–49).31 A poem with more to sa a out Hart ordin general, and a out what Stevens saw in southern New England, is“On the Wa to the bus” (1954?). All Stevens’s critics note that hetook long walks to and rom his o ce; ew notice that he also tookcit uses to work.32 Hart ord in particular, and Stevens’s Connecticutin general, ecomes in his late poetr the place o routine, the setting

or “da s [when] we give thanks or the o ce,” i not or the com-mute: “What a pro ound grace it is to have a destin no matter whatit is,” Stevens opined in 1954, “even the destin o the postman goingthe rounds and o the us driver driving the us,” the us driver who would never appear at the end o “On the Wa to the bus” ( L, 843).That poem—one o Stevens’s last, written a terThe Rock—speaksto the poet’s sometime a ection or Hart ord; it also sa s somethinga out wh Stevens continued, past the age o retirement and almostuntil his death, to show up at work. How can the man on the wa tothe us, the “transparent man” (clear as ice or as rost, a stracted),encounter the o ten “gloom ” o ligations o the da (“journalism” inthe sense o dailiness, “jour”) and et eel renewed?33

The answer lies in the “re reshment o cold air,” the newness “lightsnow” rings, the wa in which this commuter learns to hold himsel



333Stephen Burt

open to what this region can ring. This New England weather—notrotten leaves, nor the inhuman cold o “The Snow Man,” ut snowlight enough to dispel gloom—trans orms the commuter’s mood. It lets

him live, moreover, with repetitions, the repetition o words (“cold”appears three times, “perception” and “sleep” and the phrase “newknown” twice each) and the repetition o a morning routine that endsat the o ce and egins “under the wintr trees” (CPP, 472). As in “AnOrdinar Evening in New Haven,” the ever-accumulating acts o pu lichistor and “journalism” seem transitor and insigni cant—whetherrecorded in newsprint or in mar le— eside the moment-to-momentsensations that link (on a good da ) our senses to our thought.34

Repetitions—o a workda , o a walker’s path, o a us route, o a

mind pursuing its ideas— ecome in the 1950s a leitmoti or Stevens’sConnecticut poems. Seven important words or parts o words— jour- nalist/journalism, trans- (“transparent,” “translated”), “new known,”cold, perception, sleep, power —recur at least once in the ourteenlines o “On the Wa to the bus.” “The Plain Sense o Things” ( plain, in-, repetition, imagination/imagined, great, silence, require/ required )and “Nuns Painting Water Lilies” ( part , life, clearness, day) also un oldaround sets o repeated words. Such dense repetitions in his earlier work o ten indicate special musical e ects (as in the martial rh thmso “Dr Loa ”) or else unmitigated rustration (as in “The AmericanSu lime”); in the poems o his last ears (“Solitude Under the Oaks”o ers another example) the need do neither (CPP, 183, 106, 473).Individual couplets within “On the Wa to the bus” juxtapose andrepeat paired nouns, as i the poet were learning a wa o “pronounc-ing” them, o living the same moment, the same walking path, andthe same da again and again. That da comes to exist, in an English-French pun, “ e ond journalism”: its most important words are neverprinted as news, are not spoken at home, and ma never e spokeneven in principle, never ull articulated, remaining still “inside o one’s tongue” (CPP, 472).35

Stevensians will have expected m next example, “The River o Rivers in Connecticut” (1953) (CPP, 451). Its placial interest comesas no surprise— et even here acts that Stevens would have knownin orm the poem in wa s that critics have missed. beside Stevens’s“great river this side o St gia,” merel eing alive and looking, withoutteleolog or even intention, includes delight: “the mere fowing o the water is a ga et ” (CPP, 451). This river o phenomenolog , o li e aslived, “is not to e seen eneath the appearances / That tell o it.” Itis not what we see in refections on its sur ace (where “The steeple at




Farmington / Stands glistening and Haddam shines and swa s”), noris it ull separa le rom them: in the same wa , a li e is not identical with the external, recorded events it contains, and exceeds an single,

speci c term. Thus Stevens calls the river’s essence “unnamed”:It is the third commonness with light and air,A curriculum, a vigor, a local a straction . . .Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed fowing,

Space- lled, refecting the seasons, the olk-loreO each o the senses; call it, again and again,The river that fows nowhere, like a sea.

(CPP, 451)

A latter-da consensus has it that the river which Stevens instructsus not to name (a successor, in this “paean to vitalism,” to Stevens’searlier “river R”) is not “associated with an particular river”; Haddamlies on the Connecticut River, ut Farmington lies on the epon moustri utar , miles awa (CPP, 427).36

And et an o served river, too, seems to shine in those lines. TheConnecticut River is, and since prehistor has een, tidal, rom LongIsland Sound up to Windsor Locks, ourteen miles north o Hart ord.That is, it fows to the sea at e tide, ut reverses direction when

the tide comes in. The name “Connecticut,” in act, comes rom aMohegan term that ma mean “Long Tidal River”; the derivation is widespread in oral tradition—o cial tourism documents call it parto the state’s “ olk-lore.”37

It must e in this sense, among others, that the Connecticut River“fows nowhere, like a sea” (CPP, 451). To appreciate li e as like a tidal river is to appreciate a li e that requires no immanent purpose, and noconsistent direction, in order or us to pre er it strongl to death: in areversal at the end o the poem, the “propelling orce” that makes a

err impractical has no direction o its own. Stevens thus introducesa gentle iron concluding with repeated imperatives (“Call it . . .Call it, again and again”), making them the onl such ver s in thepoem.38 Rather than leading to some other land, some St gia, as theone-wa fow o an human li e leads to death, this river links up withthe sea (and the Sound) that it alread resem les, since oth inviteour contemplation without telling us where to go. I “like a sea” con-notes magnitude, or scope, then Stevens ma even e asking us tosuspend, and then again estow, on this long tidal river, its propername. The river o rivers is thus, in bar ara Fisher’s words, “the Con-necticut River and . . . more,” a descendant o the rivers in earlier



335Stephen Burt

poems drawn oth rom Penns lvania and rom New England.39 Eventhe a sent err man—an avatar, o course, o the a sent Charon—has an additional asis in local act: most o the err services across

the Connecticut River closed during Stevens’s li etime, replaced ridges meant or automo iles. The err at Hadl me, where EastHaddam meets L me, was the “last o the time-honored transports,”one chronicler wrote in 1939.40

Stevens told Renato Poggioli that he wrote “The River o Rivers”“especiall ” or him to translate into Italian; Poggioli gave it pride o place in his ilingual edition o Stevens’s poems. ( L, 778, 784).41 When we set “The River o Rivers” within its occasion (Stevens’s promise tosend Poggioli a poem) and eside Stevens’s own hunger or exotica

rom correspondents overseas (such as Leonard van Ge sel, José Ro-driguez Feo, Thomas McGreev and Peter Lee) we might see eneathits register o s m ols more “local color” than most critics assume,as i the poet projected his own desire or views rom distant placesonto the ur ane Italian to whom he wrote.42 A ter Poggioli’s quer a out the “thin men o Haddam” in “Thirteen Wa s o Looking at ablack ird,” oth the “completel yankee” qualities o Connecticut andthe location o Haddam would have een in Stevens’s mind ( L, 784).A handwritten letter to Poggioli (not included in the pu lished Let- ters) responds to a dra t translation: “[I]ntelligence,” Stevens explains,“re ers to the distortion o trees not growing in conditions natural tothem and not to houses deprived o a setting o trees.”43 The trees in“The River o Rivers,” which do not lack “intelligence,” are “growingin conditions natural to them”: the elong—as Stevens now imaginesthat he elongs—in the state where the live.44

Stevens looked at Connecticut when other people expected poemsrom him. “River o Rivers” ul lled a promise to Poggioli; “An Ordinar

Evening in New Haven” egan as a commission rom the New Haven-ased Connecticut Academ o Arts and Sciences.45 The latter poemegins and ends with the “plain,” the “transparent,” the “plainness o

plain things,” o “plain men in plain towns,” seeking in a late autumn“ arrenness” an explanation or, i not a sta against, its requentl

leak mood (CPP, 397, 398, 399, 416). On the one hand the ur anscene and season suggest “miser ”; on the other, the inspire a “latest le [that] at its most pure and most success ul” ecomes “ or iddingl theoretical,” in Vendler’s words, as i this cit , with its centuries-oldgrid plan and its academic edi ces, t a stract language especiall well(CPP, 398).46 Since this long poem has attracted so man attentivereadings alread , and ecause it does not draw on little-known acts




a out places close to Stevens’s home, I do not discuss it at length here,though it too, in its mani old speculations, takes requent interest inpu lic, outdoor space.47

Written or the Voice o America, and pu lished also in the Hart ordCourant , “Connecticut Composed” (1955) is the last piece o prosethat Stevens completed, and pro a l his last completed writing o an sort (CPP, 894, 975).48 What Stevens sa s there a out Connecticutsums up the impressions given in the poems he wrote a out it ears

e ore. His adopted state is a place o “thri t and rugalit ,” o “sparecolors,” “thin lights,” “thin and di cult . . . soil” (CPP, 894–95). Atrain ride rom Hart ord to boston via Willimantic in April makes thestate as materia poetica seem poor indeed: “Ever thing seemed gra ,

leached and derelict, and the [dact lic] word derelict kept repeatingitsel as part o the activit o the train.”And et, Stevens sa s, “this was a precious ride through the char-

acter o the state” (CPP, 894). How so? “The man who loves NewEngland and particularl the spare region o Connecticut” (spare, thatis, compared to the berkshires or to Vermont, as in “Jul Mountain”)“loves it precisel ecause o the spare colors, the thin lights, thedelicac and slightness o the eaut o the place” (CPP, 895, 476).The quintessence o Connecticut hence ecomes most apparent inseasons and scenes o austerit , o colors so thin and natural vigor so weak as to require work (mental or ph sical) e ore the can ecomeevident at all. In such places— ut not in the tropics, and not in themountains—“the reward o discipline is visi le and tangi le, or seemsto e” (CPP, 895).

For “discipline” we ma read not onl “thri t and rugalit ” ut alsointellectual e ort, even a straction. As a place o a straction—o hardthought and hard work— Stevens’s Connecticut is inviting: “Once ou are here ou are or ou are on our wa to ecome a yankee”(CPP, 895). It is not something Stevens would have said a out Read-ing, much less a out the South. Connecticut rewards persistence andintellection: its mentalit is something one ma adopt, as one adoptsa elie or a ha it, not something one must inherit. In that wa itresem les other immigrant destinations, and ma e viewed as onemodern cit , a meta-Hart ord o sorts: “a single metropolis, highl industrial,” “an industrial and usiness center” like the “Oxidia” o Ste- vens’s earlier verse (CPP, 866).49 “Going ack to Connecticut,” Stevensconcludes, “is a return to an origin,” ut an origin that “man men allover the world” can claim. because a stract, amena le to intellection,the adopted state could welcome its resident, who could no longer



337Stephen Burt

return even in imagination to the bucks and berks Counties, placeso un roken amilial rootedness, that he once called home; ecausein itsel austere, et capa le o spring (a watercolor spring, Stevens

adds), Connecticut could suit a poet whose interest in spring wouldalwa s e quali ed (as Vendler and George Lensing have shown atlength) the austerities o his own temperament. The spareness, theproximit to a straction, that Stevens saw in Connecticut let him ndthere a ground or his late poems.50

******

The late poems o Connecticut chorograph not onl refect thesense o emplacement that Stevens ound there in some moods; the solve a creative pro lem—and alleviate the miser —raised others.Stevens told the Cu an poet and editor José Rodriguez Feo that “Cu ashould e ull o Cu an things” (L, 495). yet the Stevens o the letters,like the Stevens o the poems, remained o two minds a out whetherHart ord in particular and New England in general could permit aConnecticut poet to ll his poems with Connecticut things. Octo er1948 nds him “sa ing to m sel prett constantl that li e is a dullli e”: “the long spell o dr weather” is “not at all good or a man liv-ing in a ver small spot and disliking aridit and monoton ” ( L, 620).Hart ord, Stevens told Rodriguez Feo, was “presuma l an insensi-tive mass o insensitive people,” as opposed either to Princeton or to“Havana where poets are like vines that ring color to the structureo the place out o the soil o Cu a” ( L, 623–24).

The same letter o 1948 suggests nonetheless that no poet couldaccomplish much without an imaginative elonging in some place:“one never reall writes a out li e when it is someone else’s li e. . . .One writes a out it when it is one’s own li e provided one is a good

ar arian, a true Cu an, or a true Penns lvania Dutchman” ( L, 624).Stevens’s genealogical researches included attempts to prove himsel “trul ” Dutch-American, to quali or the Holland Societ (he never,in act, quali ed). He did not elong in Reading, and was no armer.I Hart ord, Connecticut, and New England encouraged “com at”against realit rather than a ringing orth o imaginative ruit, what was the poet—who still had to live there—to do? ( L, 611)

Some late poems and prose, I have een arguing, solve thatpro lem means o a ruit ul paradox: to e a citizen o Stevens’s“Oxidian” state, to e the right man or this “unpropitious place,” is

to see asceticism, repetition and “plainness” as themselves compos-




ing the spirit proper to this place—the asis, one might add, or its“m tholog .” “A M tholog Refects Its Region” (1955?)—which JoanRichardson calls “almost a companion piece” to the essa or radio

a out Connecticut—ma e the last verse that Stevens wrote.51

Itsanomalous orm—untitled, and reaking o in the midst o a lank verse line—implies that the poet did not consider it nished, though(as with Keats’s “This Living Hand”) later readers ma see in it animaginative unit nonetheless. The lines t the otherwise-unused“A sence o M tholog ,” the next-to-last entr in Stevens’s list o potential titles or poems.52

The word “m tholog ,” like the word “intelligence,” took on, orStevens, unusual resonance. “I nished [Jean] Paulhan’sCauses Célè-

bres a week or so ago,” Stevens told bar ara Church in 1950: “whatparticularl interested me was the requenc o idioms,” among them“the one a out the m thological ackground (or m th) o a local ritualin a river” ( L, 690). The letter is land, ut the ritual (“Orpaillargues”)is izarre, its “m the” (the onl use o the word in that ook) onePaulhan all ut admits that he cannot interpret. be ore each weddingin a French village, a mannequin identical to the ride is constructedand then rituall spurned, cast adri t on a river: “On ne sait trop nonplus ce qui attendait, dans cette région, les jeunes mariées.”53 b thetime he read Causes Célèbres, Stevens had alread written a poema out a similarl izarre ritual in Penns lvania: “An Entirel New Seto O jects,” with its haunting procession o men in canoes, remem ersan annual “cele ration in Reading during which men in canoes andother vessels would foat down the Schu lkill at night carr ing candle-lit Chinese lanterns.”54

“Here / In Connnecticut,” contrast, “we never lived in a time / When m tholog was possi le” (CPP, 476). I Connecticut is a region

t or introversion, or austere imagining, and or hard work, and i “a m tholog refects its region,” what would a Connecticut m thol-og e? (CPP, 476) How could the Connecticut or the FarmingtonRiver have—how could such a state, such rivers, ever have had—m thand ritual to match Paulhan’s, or even to match Reading’s? Stevens’s“antim thological” answer is that C or Crispin, C or Connecticut (astate never named in “The Comedian”), could have no such m th: itis, instead, in “A M tholog Refects Its Region,” a place or the plainsense o things, or li e without supernatural teleolog , li e lived and worked through in the knowledge that the onl thing e ond it is death.Under these elds and these rivers lies onl mere eing; under that,nothing ut stones. The lines contain onl three ver al adjectives, all



339Stephen Burt

impl ing comparisons (“increased,” “heightened,” “ reshened”), and noadjective o an other kind, as i to refect the austerit o their site.

yet a Connecticut austerit ends up, once again, not grim ut consol-

ing: its “ reshened” satis actions refect a place-attachment achieved.Repetitions (“m tholog ,” “region,” “image,” “nature,” “creator”) make wa or simple nouns that occur once apiece. Charles berger sees in “AM tholog ” a rectangular tombeau (in the French tradition o memorialpoems), as well as a s m olic tom stone: “the su stance o his region”means, or berger, “ oth . . . the place o urial and the materialsout o which the tom sculpture is ashioned,” as “Stevens equeathshimsel to his land.”55 Stevens sees himsel living on “in the su stanceo his region,” in woods, in stone rom the ston New England “ elds

/ Or rom under his mountains” (CPP, 476). Stevens thus names theproperties that make this state t his tom : its stoniness, its tness toa straction, and the sense, which emerges even rom this ragment,that Connecticut neither suits nor requires lushl reticulated sur aces,

ut sends us instead to a “su stance” underneath.Tim Armstrong writes that nineteenth-centur American poets’

“cele ration o the wintriness o the New England tradition” ecomesor some modernists, Stevens among them, an ena ling “reduction

o the landscape to a ‘ lank’ scene,” “a contemplation o a landscape which has in act een cleared, reduced to an a stract pattern, a lankpage—as in the snowscape, in the writing o the North.”56 Armstrong’sremarka le essa on American poets o snow, rom Ralph Waldo Em-erson to Al red Corn, makes heav weather o Stevens’s “The SnowMan.” Stevens’s own rst example o an American poem, in 1950, isJohn Greenlea Whittier’s “Snow-bound” (his second is Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass) (CPP, 829). but Stevens’s interest in New Englandextends e ond weather, into the uilt environment, and into hills andstones: it would e etter to sa , or late Stevens, not a New England

lankness ut a New England asceticism, a rame containing a ew thinlines, rather than none. The last poems raise not questions o philo-sophical priorit so much as o the ver al t etween temperamentand locale, the t which the late poems o pu lic space, o Connecticutplaces named and “unnamed,” demonstrate.

In another late prose composition, “John Crowe Ransom, Tennes-sean,” Stevens writes that “one turns with something like erocit towarda land that one loves, to which one is reall and essentiall native”(CPP, 820). James Longen ach nds that such declarations o satis ac-tion with Ransom’s supposed Tennessee sit sadl esides the “jokes”in Stevens’s late letters a out “the thinness o his own experience.”57




I Ransom’s poems are “composed o Tennessee,” how could Stevens’spoems, given his tendenc towards a straction, compose themselves o an place at all? The answer he nds in his late work—an answer not

present in his earlier poems o Northern unease—is that the poemsare indeed composed o Connecticut, ecause the austerit , the Prot-estant sel -control, the spareness and thinness o their language (oncethe countervailing drive to luxurious diction in the earlier Stevens ellawa ) t the poet, who there t the place.

******

The philosopher J. E. Malpas argues that an su jectivit —an consciousness, an action, and an representation o either—requiresimplicit concepts o space and place: “there is no possi ilit o under-standing human . . . thought and experience . . . other than through anunderstanding o place and localit .”58 Malpas’s argument (conductedin part through de ates internal to anal tic philosoph , as a responseto P. F. Strawson) distinguishes rectilinear, gridded, a stract “space”

rom identi a le, intuitive “place,” and then suggests that the con-cepts o jective and su jective, space and time, sel and other, spatialand placial, all depend upon one another, so that we cannot haveone without all the rest: “these elements are themselves esta lishedonl in relation to each other, and so onl within the topographicalstructure o place.”59 Whether or not a particular individual eelsespeciall attached to a particular place, Malpas argues, “we are thesort o thinking, remem ering, experiencing creatures we are onl in virtue o our active engagement in place.”60 When we imagine aperson, Malpas concludes, we envision that person somewhere, hereand not there, even i that “where” is uncom orta le, or impossi le tosustain, or altered in the course o the work we read.

To make such claims so aldl is to make nonsense o a great deal o l ric poetr . Where, exactl , does George Her ert’s “Virtue” take place?Some poems have settings, real (William Wordsworth on Westminsterbridge) or o viousl ctionalized (the brontës’ Gondal); o others wecan sa onl that the poet ma speak and e heard—as Christina Ros-setti wrote—“Somewhere or Other.”61 We can also, though, sa thatthe more a poet eels that literature or consciousness require someorientation in place or in space, the more a poet might eel uneas a out his own tendenc towards a straction, and the more he mighttake an interest in signals and gures o place. Such a progression

seems to have happened to Stevens, especiall , ut not exclusivel ,in the last ears o his li e. The opposition placial vs. spatial, a sense



341Stephen Burt

o presence in a speci c locale versus a sense that all locations eelalike, can even replace, in Stevens’s late poetr , the earlier oppositiono South vs. North. “It makes so little di erence,” he writes in “Long

and Sluggish Lines,” “ where one looks, one has een there e ore”:this poem o repetitions, whose “trees . . . kept sa ing over and overone same, same thing,” concludes onl once it astens on aspects (suchas the “ ellow . . . side o a house”) particular to a place (CPP, 442–43;emphasis added).

At least one o Stevens’s poems rom the 1940s arrives, dejectedl (since the poem itsel contains no signs o place-attachment), at some-thing like Malpas’s implausi le conclusion. There are no convincingl imagined domains, “Crude Fo er” argues, except those we derive rom

places we have known rsthand: an “landscape o the mind” is at itsroot “a landscape onl o the e e” (CPP, 270). A much longer poemromTransport to Summer , “Description Without Place,” pursues the

opposite argument: “seeming is description without place,” “the utureis description without place,” and “an arti cial thing that exists / In itsown seeming” ma ecome “Intenser than an actual li e could e”(CPP, 301). Even this poem in its con dent peroration returns to thenotion o place-attachment, o poets (or even “men”) who speak romand o real places—it is simpl that their words create, or re-create,the place. “The hard hidalgo / Lives in the mountainous character o his speech” (Stevens ma have in mind the P renees). yet (comparedto “The Comedian” or to “Crude Fo er”) the line o causalit etweenearthl site and imaginative language has een reversed: here evena “Spaniard” learns to see Spain a ove all through “descriptions” o Spain.62 We can there ore see (or “see”) vividl not onl the places where we might travel or settle, ut also domains where our odiescannot go— “the past,” or example, and “the uture,” and ( or Stevens)Ce lon, Havana, Spain (CPP, 302). Such an arti cial domain, thoughonl “a cast // O the imagination, made in sound,” ma nonetheless “bealive with its own seemings, seeming to e / Like ru ies reddened ru ies reddening” (CPP, 302). The con dent s mmetries o Stevens’sconclusion (whose apparent endorsement o the autotelic imaginationraises the ire o sociall minded critics) end o the pessimism projected such late poems o displacement and loneliness as “CrudeFo er” and “De ris o Li e and Mind.” We might even see “CrudeFo er” and the last part o “Description Without Place” as thesis andantithesis, opposites reconciled such later, chorographic poems as“The River o Rivers,” whose landscapes o the mind are also, ut notonl , landscapes o the e e.63




From “The Comedian” to “Description Without Place” to “TheRiver o Rivers,” Stevens’s poems include pro lems o place-relations:how to descri e ad ones, how to discover and then to descri e good

ones. Wesle Kort, who has considered such matters at length, callsad place-relations “alienating,” and good ones “accommodating”: agood place, a place that seems to e right or us, is one where we

eel at home, and one within which we eel mo ile, relativel un-constrained.64 Connecticut gave the later Stevens an accommodatingstage or thinking a out place-relations, ecause its muted tones, itscom ination o com ort and discom ort, placed it etween nowhereand somewhere, etween a too strongl colored, too vivid, localit (asin his earlier poems o an overripe Florida) and a sometimes con ound-

ingl placeless mental li e.A sense o etweenness, o transition, o such edges and intermedi-ate zones as those etween home and awa , all and winter, winter andspring, o ten in orms the ideas a out place in late Stevens, oth theideas a out places that his poems avor and their ideas o the poet’sdivided states o mind. As Kevin L nch notes in his classic o ur anplanning, The Image of the City, walkers in ur an places (includingparks) seek a “distinctive and legi le environment,” creating their ownmental maps composed o “path, landmark, edge, node and district.”65 The cit and the legi le parts thereo , in L nch’s model, are made upnot so much o destinations and regions ut o wa s to get etween onedestination and another: such transitions characterize our experienceo ur an pu lic space. “Paths with clear and well-known origins anddestinations . . . helped tie the cit together and gave the o server asense o his earing.”66 Poems o geographic transitional space—o a

o er, a pond’s margin, a long river ank— ecome or Stevens poemsa out that other oundar that vexes so man o his poems, the line

etween a mostl solitar inner li e and the resonances it seeks inoutward space.

No wonder, then, that Stevens’s late work so o ten depicts edges andpaths, along with structures and sites appropriate to them: gurative“thresholds” (as in the opening stanza o “To an Old Philosopher inRome”), literal sites o em arkation, such as a us stop or a river ank,or semi-enclosed structures, such as gaze os, porches or o ers, in which we ma stop ut not remain. “Just as the child in transitionalspace exists etween harsh external realit and sel -serving internal

antas ,” writes the philosopher Edward Case , “so the person on theporch—or in other compara le intermediate places—exists etweenprivate and pu lic or etween the rigors o the journe and the com-



343Stephen Burt

orts o inha itation.”67 The health o the o ers, paths and edges inStevens—are the decrepit, as in “The Plain Sense o Things”? orre reshing, as in “On the Wa to the bus”?— ecomes an index or

Stevens’s ps che, or the com ort, or lack o it, in his later work.68

“Toan Old Philosopher in Rome” egins as a poem o ur an and o gura-tive “thresholds” (Stevens’s own repeated term) and allows its excursesto conclude onl when the end it imagines or George Santa ana’s li ecan integrate interior and exterior, mental re uge, domestic interior,and ur an space, conceiving “the li e o the cit ” as continuous withthe li e o the mind, and as “part o the li e in our room” (CPP, 431,434). The man o “Local O jects” is “a spirit without a o er,” until hemakes his own “a solute o er” out o the things or which he nds

resh names (CPP, 473–74). And the automo ile passenger o “Realit Is an Activit o the Most August Imagination”—Stevens’s last poemto include the name o a cit , and a poem that distinguishes Hart ordand Cornwall, Connecticut rom glamorous cities overseas— ndsthat transitional health, that “vigor o glor ,” in a passing landscapethat suits Stevens in part ecause it is so austere as to seem almostnonph sical, an “insolid” space or the li e o the mind: “an argentinea straction approaching orm / And suddenl den ing itsel awa ”(CPP, 471–72).

New readings o dura le poems are ends in themselves, as is newevidence a out the circumstances o their making. This evidence a outStevens and Connecticut, Stevens and the sense o place, should alsoshow those readers who want such evidence how Stevens’s late workspeaks to matters o pu lic space, and hence o pu lic li e. Stevens’schorographic late poems, moreover, speak to two other projects currentin literar studies generall , projects that have not hereto ore oundmuch room or him. First, to see Stevens as a poet o place-attachmentis to see his relevance to ecocriticism. Lawrence buell recommendsthat “literature and environment studies . . . reckon more ull withthe interdependence etween ur an and out ack landscapes,” and thatcritics seek out works that “put ‘green’ and ‘ rown’ landscapes, thelandscapes o exur ia and industrialization, in conversation with eachother.”69 Stevens’s late work attends to the interlocking properties o rivers and towns, parkland and cit scape, “Oxidian” development and“natural nakedness” (CPP, 149, 430). His New England poetr —mosto all “The River o Rivers”— ecomes what buell calls “watershed lit-erature,” connecting components o the Connecticut River s stem romLong Island Sound to New Hampshire and Vermont.70 Stevens’s late verse o accommodation to his adopted “origin,” his austere southern




New England, with its steeples, refections and ponds, indeed shows“copresence o ‘ uilt’ and ‘natural’ elements,” where “ever where iseither upstream or downstream (or oth) rom somewhere else.”71

Second, and perhaps more surprising, to see how Stevens’s linesaddress the particular spaces through which he moved is to think againa out poems and odies. Recent theorists o l ric poetr sometimespropose that poems resem le, and that the help us imagine, human

odies. For Susan Stewart, “[D]ivergence in l ric is not etweenlanguage and music ut etween . . . the somatic [and] the social”;making poetr is like reathing li e into matter, so that the theor o l ric must include an “ontolog o m ths o animation.”72 Stevens inold age eared that he had chosen “not to live / In a ph sical world,”

that he had deleted the somatic rom his poetr and rom his li e(CPP, 286). One o his most o ten quoted late poems asks: “I wonder,have I lived a skeleton’s li e / As a dis eliever in realit , // A countr mano all the ones in the world?” (CPP, 598). His readers have at timesasked similar questions: the generall s mpathetic bart Eeckhout notesother critics’ complaints that Stevens’s oeuvre lacks “real people o feshand lood.”73 Desolation, a andonment and loneliness (as in “De riso Li e and Mind” or “Vacanc in the Park”) are eelings as “real” as jo : readers who have not ound vivid eelings in Stevens’s last poemshave not looked ver hard. yet we ma ask, with “As you Leave theRoom,” whether the poems take account o somatic experience, andespeciall whether the include its pleasures.

Stevens’s late poetr o Connecticut nds, indeed, such eelings, utonl i we think in the right wa a out what “the od ” means. Hispoems o weather and site nd “part o a major realit ” in “snow” andrain, in water and air in motion, in “weather a ter it has cleared,” in walking through Hart ord or New Haven, riding in an automo ile orstanding still in a park (CPP, 598, 474). To understand what happensto the poet’s imagined od , to understand the eelings (the “re resh-ment” in “On the Wa to the bus,” or example) that precede intel-lection and which the poem attempts to explain, we have to conceiveo that od as including the natural and architectural elements thata ect its disposition in space. Stevens’s late poems o Connecticut thusproject, at times, what the visual artists Madeline Gins and Arakawacall the “architectural od ”: “em odied mind,” as Gins and Arakawaexplain, “extends out e ond the od -proper into the architecturalsurround.”74 In terms used another theorist o em odiment, Clau-dia benthien, the od o the pedestrian in “On the Wa to the bus”rides on, rather than within, and not as something trapped inside, the



345Stephen Burt

skin.75 Such poems thus t Gins and Arakawa’s “architectural od h pothesis” (which the also call a “sited awareness h pothesis”), which where ou are, how ou are remade a site, ma ecome part

o what ou take our od to e.Not all Stevens’s late poems support such a claim a out odies,ut the ones that do are, not coincidence, those most closel tied

to places, i not to place names. “Realit Is an Activit o the MostAugust Imagination” comes to mind again here, along with “The Rivero Rivers.” So does “Arti cial Populations”: the “arti cial population”Stevens there discovers at his own “centre” “is like / A healing-point inthe sickness o the mind,” ecause it heals the alse distinction etweenmind and odies, the distinction that a too narrow (or too simpl sexu-

alized) view o the od creates. The poems o place-attachment romStevens’s last ears ecome (in a phrase that suits Stevens’s late poetr generall ) what Gins and Arakawa call “tentative constructings towardsholdings in place,” expressions o “organism-environment-person.”76 Such poems o margins, river anks, roads and paths include—inanother Stevensian ormulation—“the things that in each other areincluded,” air and earth and water, mind and od , and landscape andplace (CPP, 348). To see Stevens onl in this wa would e wrong (it would, among other pro lems, e ace the loneliness that underlieseven such consolator poems as “The Hermitage at the Center”). Tosee him this wa among others is to see with new emphasis how hispoems pursue “the metaph sical changes that occur / Merel in livingas and where we live” (CPP, 287, emphasis added).

“I have no wish to arrive at a conclusion,” Stevens told bernardHeringman; it is an admonition Stevens’s interpreters have not alwa skept in mind ( L, 710). Once on the trail o Connecticut in late Stevens, we might see traces o it in other poems, even those that include nour an properties and no proper nouns. “The image o New Englandin earl spring,” Stevens told Thomas McGreev in April 1954, “is animage not et exploited” ( L, 827). He exploited that image in “NotIdeas A out the Thing but the Thing Itsel ,” which egins “At theearliest ending o winter,” though he returned to the imagined Southo Harmonium or “O Mere being,” pro a l the last completed poemo all (CPP, 451, 476). “A Discover o Thought,” a poem rom 1950a out “the antipodes o poetr , dark winter,” in which “the houses o New England catch the rst sun,” ecomes not onl a poem or the winter solstice (compare Keats’s “In drear-nighted Decem er” and Williams’ “These / are the desolate dark weeks”) ut a poem a out aNew England Christmas: in it Stevens imagines what a spare, e ort-




ul, reticent, secularized Connecticut version o the Christ child woulde (CPP, 459).77 Stevens’s late l ric poems or his adopted state do

not t together into one mood, nor do the add up to one consecu-

tive argument. The do, however, support claims a out how Stevenscould see Connecticut, and a out how Stevens saw certain sites withinConnecticut, during the late 1940s and 1950s. This state t this poet

ecause, or him, its ver particulars tended towards a straction. Itsspare, thin colors, its idirectional river, its major park and aging minorstructures, had ecome the poet’s own.

Harvard University

NOTES

M thanks to bart Eeckhout, Nick Halpern and Helen Vendler or their encouragingcomments on earlier versions o this essa .

1 Wallace Stevens,Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Rich-ardson (New york: Li rar o America, 1997), 901. Herea ter a reviatedCPP andcited parentheticall page num er.

2 T. F. Lom ardi, “Wallace Stevens: At Home in Penns lvania,”Wallace Stevens Journal 2 (1978): 16. Lom ardi cites Stevens’s 1935 letter to J. R. L. Latimer: “While,o course, m imagination is a most important actor, nevertheless I wonder whether,i ou were to suggest an particular poem, I could not nd an actual ackground

or ou” ( Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holl Stevens [berkele : Univ. o Cali orniaPress, 1969], 289. Herea ter a reviated L and cited parentheticall page num er).Eleanor Cook nds in Stevens a “pro ound sense o place, historical, social, ph sicaland so on” (Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War in Wallace Stevens [Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Press, 1988], 14). For another valua le examination o Stevens’s sense o place,in general, see bar ara Fisher, Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous(Charlot-tesville: Univ. Press o Virginia, 1990), 107–27. On Stevens and the idea o landscapein art, see bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground (Cam ridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003),53–85. A recent overview o work on Stevens and place is John Serio’s introduction tothe special issue o The Wallace Stevens Journaldevoted to “Poetics o Place,” thoughthe special issue itsel has little to sa a out how the poems—apart rom “An Ordinar Evening in New Haven”—use places in Connecticut. See John Serio, “Introduction:A Personal Refection,” Wallace Stevens Journal27 (2003): 3–6.

3 The est collection o such acts is now Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to WallaceStevens (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).

4 On Stevens and Hart ord, see Samuel French Morse, “A Sense o Place,” inTheMotive for Metaphor , ed. Francis blessington and Gu Rotella (boston: NortheasternUniv. Press, 1983), 4–25; on Stevens and Connecticut in general, see also WilliamDoreski, “Wallace Stevens in Connecticut,”Twentieth-Century Literature 39 (1993):152–65; Lawrence Kramer, “‘A Completel New Set o O jects’: The Sense o Place in Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives,” inCritical Essays on Wallace Stevens, ed. StevenAxelrod and Helen Deese (boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 213–30; and James baird,TheDome and the Rock(baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), 231–42.

5 See, especiall , Alan Filreis,Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton:Princeton Univ. Press, 1991) and James Longen ach,Wallace Stevens: The Plain



347Stephen Burt

Sense of Things(New york: Ox ord Univ. Press, 1991); more recent examples includeJacqueline Vaught brogan, The Violence Within, the Violence Without(Athens: Univ.o Georgia Press, 2003); and Lee M. Jenkins,Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Hove:Sussex Academic Press, 1999). For an earlier, polemical, and or a time infuential stud o Stevens and politics (one which also deprecates the poems o his last phase), seeFrank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police(Madison: Univ. o Wisconsin Press, 1988).

6 “What he called his ‘unique and solitar home’” in “The Poem that Took the Placeo a Mountain,” bates explains, “was not the Penns lvania o his o hood, exactl ,

ut a paysage imaginaire that derived rom it” (Milton J. bates, “Stevens as RegionalPoet,” Wallace Stevens Journal5 [1981]: 35). The est and most recent treatment o Stevens and Penns lvania emphasizes his sense that, there, “man generations that havedwelled” in the same place esta lished imaginative roots in the land (Justin Quinn,“Famil and Place in Wallace Stevens,”Wallace Stevens Journal27 [2003]: 65). Lom ardiargues that Stevens’s continued attachment to southeastern Penns lvania precludedan attachment to New England, even up to the end o his li e. See Lom ardi,Wal-lace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone(Cran ur , NJ: Susquehanna Univ. Press,1996), 26, 29–31, 220–21. Other treatments o Stevens and Penns lvania include Ja Semel, “Penns lvania Dutch Countr : Stevens’s World as Meditation,”Contemporary Literature 14 (1973): 310–19; and Charles J. Adams III, “Wallace Stevens: Poet Laureateo the Penns lvania Dutch,”Reading Reads: The Greater Reading Literary Festival,http://www.readingreads.com/2006/index.php?id=wallace_stevens.

7 Joan Richardson,Wallace Stevens: The Later Years(New york: William Morrow,1988), 274.

8 Frank Kermode, Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism 1958–2002(New york:Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 154. An important earl reaction to Stevens’s lastpoems is Randall Jarrell’s 1955 “The Collected Poems o Wallace Stevens” (The ThirdBook of Criticism[New york: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969], 55–76). The most im-portant extended stud o the last poems remains Helen Vendler,Words Chosen Outof Desire (Cam ridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); the most recent o interest is b. J.Leggett, Late Stevens (baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2005). Some relevantand detailed readings o “An Ordinar Evening in New Haven” are Keith Mannecke,“Wallace Stevens’s ‘An Ordinar Evening in New Haven’: The ‘Inescapa le Romance’o Place,”Wallace Stevens Journal27 (2003): 80–96; Roger Gil ert,Walks in the World (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 75–106; Harold bloom,Wallace Stevens: ThePoems of Our Climate(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), 305–37; Helen Vendler,OnExtended Wings: Wallace Stevens’s Longer Poems(Cam ridge: Harvard Univ. Press,1969), 269–308; and Ronald Sukenick,Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure(Newyork: New york Univ. Press, 1967), 167–86.9On Stevens’s a stract or “alge raic . . . sort o poetr ,” see especiall Vendler,WordsChosen Out of Desire, 8. Charles Altieri, contrast, opposes Stevens’s “a straction” notto particularit in character, setting or stor , ut to “humanism” (“Wh Stevens Mustbe A stract, or What a Poet Can Learn rom Painting,” inWallace Stevens: The Poeticsof Modernism, ed. Al ert Gelpi [Cam ridge: Cam ridge Univ. Press, 1985], 95).

10 Cook, Word-Play, 296.11 Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire, 6.12 Peter baldwin, Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford

1850–1930(Colum us: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1999), 135.13 Peter brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered(New york: Ran-

dom House, 1977), 231. Stevens took a literar visitor in 1952 to Eliza eth Park “tosee a tree,” a larch (brazeau, 134). Stevens also visited Eliza eth Park on a “Sunda




morning walk” that he descri ed in 1950 to bar ara Church: “I tried to pretend thatever thing in nature is arti cial and that ever thing arti cial is natural, as, or example,that the roses in Eliza eth Park are placed there dail some lover o mankind andthat Paris is an eruption o nature” ( L, 684).

14 George Lensing connects it to “Stevens’s own lank state o mind in the all o 1952, especiall as he walked through the amiliar Eliza eth Park eeling keenl his. . . isolation” (Wallace Stevens and the Seasons[baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.Press, 2001], 62). “The pond o the mind,” agrees bonnie Costello, “ egins in Eliza ethPark”; her rie reading ocuses instead on contrasts etween Stevens and Thoreau(70–72). Ro ert Pack emphasizes the same poem’s “human need or connection withthe ph sical world” (“Place and Nothingness in Wallace Stevens,”Wallace Stevens Journal 27 [2003]: 102).

15 Alicia Cornelio,Elizabeth Park: A Century of Beauty (Virginia beach: Donning,2003), 65, 70. M thanks to Cornelio or our telephone conversation in Decem er2007 a out the histor o the park. The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to Con-necticut, pu lished in 1938, touts Eliza eth Park or its “rose- eds,” “hothouses andexperimental houses” (Connecticut: Its Roads, Lore and People [boston: HoughtonMi fin, 1938], 189).

16 Cornelio, Elizabeth Park, 23.17 “Hollister Favors Razing Pond House,”Hartford Courant , 3 April 1952, 19.18 A ew ears later the house was indeed destro ed; the current Pond House is a

recent replacement. “Can’t Something be Done with the Pond House?” HartfordCourant , 25 June 1953, 12; Roger Dove, “100 Elderlies Ask Council to Save ParkHouse,” Hartford Courant , 24 June 1953, 1.

19 Leggett, Late Stevens, 16–19.20 During Stevens’s adulthood, the su ur s o Hart ord grew ast, ut the cit itsel

had not et egun to shrink. See Malcolm Johnson,Yesterday’s Connecticut(Miami:E. A. Seemann, 1976), 119.

21 bart Eeckhout, ollowing Cook, notes a pla throughout “The Plain Sense o Things” with the sound “in,” as i Stevens himsel , or his monitor rat, wished to go“in” to the ruined estate he sees. He cannot: no human events can take place there,nor is there much in the “cold” pond or a rat to eat. See Eeckhout,Wallace Stevensand the Limits of Reading and Writing(Colum ia, Mo.: Univ. o Missouri Press, 2002),200; and Cook, Word-Play, 297. Longen ach, unusuall , sees “The Plain Sense o Things” as reassuring—a poem in which “ever thing ecomes precious when we havedeveloped or it a resh name”— ut “The River o Rivers” as leak: “it even makesthe a terworld seem . . . riendlier . . . than earth” (305).

22 Though the ew critics who discuss “The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda” con-nect it rightl to Stevens’s outh in Reading, where a pagoda awaited oung lovers“alone on a mountain,” the poem’s presence in the same group o poems as “NunsPainting Water Lilies” suggests a link to the gaze o in the park in Hart ord (CPP,456). On “The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda” and “an actual pagoda,” see alsoCook, Word-Play, 299.

23 Cook, Reader’s Guide,282. See Cornelio,Elizabeth Park, 87.24 b the postwar era asphalt paving covered Hart ord’s major roads, with macadam

onl on park paths and side streets. The matter o which streets to repave, and when,seems to have een especiall salient in West Hart ord, which controlled part o Eliza eth Park. See baldwin,Domesticating the Street, 207–09.

25 Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire, 59.



349Stephen Burt

26 See Greg Williamson, “Dou le Exposures,” in hisErrors in the Script (Sewanee,TN: Sewanee/Overlook, 2001), 33–58.

27 Park planners in Hart ord argued over how much, and how, to segregate separateparks or separate uses; Eliza eth Park made room oth or children’s games and oradults who wished to contemplate natural eaut —planners unsurprisingl saw it as asuccess. See baldwin,Domesticating the Street, 116–46. Stevens could not have knownJane Jaco s’s infuential argument that ur an spaces, including parks, fourish onl through a diversit o uses, though Jaco s’s admirers might nd in “The Hermitage”and “Nuns Painting Water Lilies” some evidence or it. See Jaco s,The Death and Life of Great American Cities(New york: Vintage, 1961), 89–111, 152–77.

28 “The Plain Sense o Things” and “The Hermitage at the Center” appeared in the Nation in Decem er 1952, “Vacanc ” inHudson Review in August, “Nuns” in the journal Wake in 1950 (see Cook,Reader’s Guide, 280, 284, 301).

29 brazeau identi es the “rustic ar or” in “Vacanc in the Park” with the real ga-ze o in Eliza eth Park. See brazeau, 232; see also Lensing,Wallace Stevens and theSeasons, 154.30 A letter o 1952 to Sister bernetta Quinn seems to anticipate the poem: “Thismorning I walked around in the park here or almost an hour e ore coming to theo ce and elt as lank as one o the ponds which in the weather at this time o earare motionless. but perhaps it was the lankness that made me enjo it so much” ( L,762).

31 See Cook, Reader’s Guide, 294. For pictures o the restored church, which nowserves Hart ord’s Latino worshippers, see The Church o the Good Shepherd—Hart ord,http://www.cgshart ord.org/id8.html.

32 A us conductor in Ireland, Stevens wrote to Thomas McGreev in 1948, must“know ever one on the run just as conductors do here” ( L, 611). See also Letters,643.33 Stevens himsel took an evening paper, the now-de unct (and hard-to-o tain)Hartford Times, not the morning paper o “On the Wa to the bus,” though he wouldhave seen other commuters reading the morning paper, the Hartford Courant . See Letters 594, 856. See also Richardson, 315.

34 “The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was: part o the rever eration / O a wind night as it is, when the mar le statues / Are like newspapers lown the wind” (CPP, 404). See Vendler, On Extended Wings, 277.

35 For Lensing, “On the Wa to the bus” nds pleasure in imagining “a worldli erated rom the . . . excrescences o the intrusive sel ” (Wallace Stevens and theSeasons, 170).

36 bloom, 365; Thomas Hines,The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens(Lewis urg, PA:bucknell Univ. Press, 1976), 258. On “The River o Rivers” and actual rivers, see alsoP. D. Henr , “In the Connecticut Grain,” Kenyon Review, n.s., 7 (1985), 88–89; andCook, Reader’s Guide,296.

37The O cial State o Connecticut We site, “A out Connecticut,” http://www.ct.gov/ ctportal/cwp/view.asp?a=843&q=246434; see Johnson,Yesterday’s Connecticut, 11.

38 Vendler writes that “the ease o [this] poem is more admira le even than its or-titude”: the river’s lack o consistent direction ecomes another measure o that ease(Words Chosen Out of Desire, 77). “I like to think o all the small ports and har ors,”Stevens mused in “Connecticut Composed,” and “also the towns up and down theConnecticut River” (CPP, 896). On the poem in general, see also Fisher, 147–54;Doreski, 156–58; and Steven Shaviro, “‘That Which Is Alwa s beginning’: Stevens’sLate Poetr o A rmation,”PMLA100 (1985): 220–33.




39Fisher, 149. The “fecked river / Which kept fowing and never the same wa twice”in another late poem, “This Solitude o Cataracts,” refects “thought-like Monadnocks,”(CPP, 366) though Lom ardi, o edient to his thesis, groups it with the poems o Schu lkill and Swatara: see Lom ardi,Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone,191. The tidal qualit o the river ma e relevant, too, to “O Hart ord in a PurpleLight”: in that earlier poem o apostrophe and description, the sun, arriving at laston his “trip / From Havre to Hart ord” and ringing “the ocean with” him, discovers“the spra / O the ocean” at twilight, which is to sa the presence o the eminine ando the aesthetic, even in that usinesslike, Northern, masculine place (CPP, 208). OnHart ord and “O Hart ord in a Purple Light,” see also Doreski, 154–56.

40 Marguerite Allis,Connecticut River (New york: G. P. Putnam, 1939), 184. Thiserr and another at the shoreline were the onl two in operation as o 1939; oth still

operate toda . See T. R. Lewis and J. E. Hammon,Connecticut: A Geography(boulder: Westview, 1986), 121; and The Connecticut Department o Transportation, “Rock Hill-Glaston ur Ferr ,” http://www.ct.gov/dot/cwp/view.asp?A=1380&Q=259738.

41 See Wallace Stevens,Mattino Domenicale ed Altre Poesie, trans. Renato Poggioli(Rome: Giulio Einaudi, 1953), 164–65.

42On Stevens’s oreign correspondents, see Lensing,Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth (baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1986), 227–41. A more recent treatmentis Filreis, 160–206.

43 Wallace Stevens to Renato Poggioli, 10 Jul 1953, Houghton Li rar , HarvardUniversit , cited in Poggioli, 185; see also Sukenick, 196.

44 Doreski gets this stanza ackwards; or him, the “trees / That lack the intelligenceo trees” are trees that grow the river o rivers, rather than trees that grow instead

the “ lack cataracts,” on the unseen St gian shores. See Doreski, 156–57.45Stevens told Louis Martz that he had “ xed on this idea o a poem a out a walk in

New Haven, ut then ranching out,” making the site “so generalized that it isn’t an longer a local place” (quoted in Gil ert, 77). both Cook and Gil ert argue that it islocal: or the ormer, Stevens’s “close contact with the cit o New Haven” means thatthe “movements o the meditation can e mapped” (Cook,Word-Play, 267, 268). Forthe latter, “the poet’s experience o New Haven . . . is an almost constant presence”;“the cit ecomes a testing ground or his speculations” (Gil ert,Walks in the World,77). For other readings o “An Ordinar Evening in New Haven,” see note 8, a ove.

46 Vendler, On Extended Wings, 305.47 because New Haven is gra , unglamorous, and not where the poet lives, Roger

Gil ert explains, “walking in New Haven on a wind evening in late autumn ensuresthat one’s love o the real is genuine” (Gil ert,Walks in the World, 102). For Vendler,Stevens’s linguistic ocus on “the ordinar and the unenchanted,” even on “the totalcolorlessness o the a solute,” attempt to “account, in terms o consciousness, or adepression which is overwhelmingl ph sical,” the “meta olic depletion o age” (Ven-dler, On Extended Wings, 271, 287).

48 The onl recent discussion o “Connecticut Composed” appears to e Filreis’slook at the Cold War context or the radio series: see Filreis, 247–50. For an earlierdiscussion, see baird, 240–41.

49 “Oxidia” is the industrial conur ation o “The Man with the blue Guitar,” “theseed / Dropped out o this am er-em er pod” that Stevens’s “evolved” man makesinto his paradoxical Ol mpia (CPP, 149).

50 See Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire; and Lensing, Wallace Stevens and theSeasons. For amil and rootedness in Penns lvania, see Lom ardi and Quinn, note6 a ove.



351Stephen Burt

51 Richardson, 425.52 Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth, 187.53 Jean Paulhan, Les Causes Célèbres(Paris: burins de Krol, 1951), 20–21.54 Semel, 316. Semel credits D. R. Shenton with the discover .55 Charles berger, Forms of Farewell (Madison: Univ. o Wisconsin Press, 1985),

177.56 Tim Armstrong, “Winter Aesthetics: The Closed Field in American Modernist

Poetr ,”Modern American Landscapes, ed. Mick Gidle and Ro ert Lawson-Pee les(Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 1995), 136–37.

57 Longen ach, 296.58 J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography(Cam ridge:

Cam ridge Univ. Press, 1999), 15–16.59 Malpas, 163.60 Malpas, 177.61 Christina Rossetti, “Somewhere or Other,”The New Oxford Book of Victorian

Verse, ed. Christopher Ricks (New york: Ox ord Univ. Press, 1987), 297–98.62 Cook identi es a line o “Spaniards” romHarmonium to the last poems: seeCook, Word-Play, 304–06.

63 A good summar o politicall -minded critics’ interest in “Description WithoutPlace” is Margaret Dickie, “Teaching the New Stevens,” inTeaching Wallace Stevens,ed. John Serio and b. J. Leggett (Knoxville: Univ. o Tennessee Press, 1994), 288–90.One detailed political reading o the poem is Filreis,Wallace Stevens and the ActualWorld, 151–60, 181–85. brogan admires, implausi l , its “ethical vision or America”(86). Vendler nds the poem unsatis ing or other reasons: seeOn Extended Wings,217–30.

64 Wesle Kort,Place and Space in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: Univ. o FloridaPress, 2004), 205.65 Kevin L nch,The Image of the City(Cam ridge: MIT Press, 1960), 5, 8.

66 L nch, 54.67Edward Case ,Getting Back Into Place(bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993),

121–22. Such analogies o viousl provide material or ps choanal tic readings: see,especiall , D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New york: Penguin, 1971); andTransitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott, ed. PeterRudn tsk (New york: Colum ia Univ. Press, 1993).

68 Case himsel makes repeated re erence to Stevens, nding in “Anecdote o theJar” and “A M tholog Refects Its Region” a less trou led dwelling in New Englandthan I do. See Case ,Getting Back Into Place, 236–39.

69 Lawrence buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cam ridge: Harvard Univ.Press, 2001), 8, 7.

70 buell, 243. To think o “The River o Rivers” as watershed literature might alsoaddress the quondam puzzle a out the presence o Farmington in that poem, since,though the town o that name lies a ew miles awa rom the Connecticut River,the Farmington River drains into it. For the berkshires, New Hampshire (MountMonadnock and riverine “cataracts”) and Vermont, seeCollected Poems and Prose,366, 476; on “This Solitude o Cataracts,” see also Cook,Word-Play, 307–09, andSukenick, 164–65.

71 buell, 254.72Susan Stewart,Poetry and the Fate of the Senses(Chicago: Univ. o Chicago Press,

2002), 44, 169.




73Eeckhout, 126. An entire ook, the poet Mark Hallida , indicts the “a stractionand lack o vivid particularit ” that Hallida nds in Stevens’s work (Stevens and theInterpersonal [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991], 119).

74 Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: Univ. o Ala amaPress, 2002), 12, 51.75 The “conception o the skin as a house . . . in which the su ject lies hidden . . . isdiametricall opposed to the perception o skin as a elt oundar that can e expe-rienced” gurativel or sensoril through, or example, “characterization o people orplaces as cold or warm” (Claudia benthien,Skin, trans. Thomas Dunlap [New york:Colum ia Univ. Press, 2002], 36).

76 Gins and Arakawa, 69.77John Keats,Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cam ridge: Harvard Univ. Press,

1978), 163; William Carlos Williams,Collected Poems, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christo-pher MacGowan, 2 vol. (New york: New Directions, 1986), 1:458. Compare Stevens’sletter to James Powers o 21 Decem er 1953, in which his delight at a sermon on theradio—not so much or its religious content, ut or its sense that Christmas has somemeaning or someone—makes him “clap m hands . . . and sa bravo! bravo! Perhapsthat onl goes to show how queer ou ecome i ou remain in New England longenough” ( L, 805). For other readings o “A Discover o Thought,” see Vendler,OnExtended Wings, 312–14; berger, 153–57; and bloom, 351–54. “Knowing ever thing,this in ant creature is ever thing” (Vendler,On Extended Wings, 313); “Like Christ he will e a human epitome” (Lensing,Wallace Stevens and the Seasons, 159).

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ELH Wallace Stevens Connecticut