Wallace Stevens Where He Lived

Stephen Burt

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

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/elh.0.0085

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v077/77.2.burt.html

Access Provided by Elihu Burritt Library @ Central Conn. State University at 10/14/10 5:25PM GMT
WALLACE STEVENS: WHERE HE LIVED

by stephen burt

“Life is an affair of people not of places,” Wallace Stevens wrote.

“But for me it is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”1 His readers
have sometimes asked which places, and why. One critic even claims
that he “never wrote anything without recourse to a specific place,” as
if his locales served, for Stevens, the same generative function as his
titles.2 Taken literally, the proposition seems absurd: what real island
provides the home for Captain Bawda? Stevens’s poems are primarily
imaginative constructions, not literal records of externally verifiable
events, places and times. Yet facts about real sites that Stevens knew
well (some of them noted by no earlier critic) inform Stevens’s works,
especially in the deliberately plain poems of his final years.3 Stevens
brought his Connecticut into his works of art partly through his ar-
rangements of grammar and sound, and partly through matters of local
history, regional lore, and even urban planning.4 Much-noted studies
of Stevens’s political alignments claim to correct earlier views of the
poet as wholly inattentive to public life: those studies have proven most
fruitful for Stevens’s work of the 1930s and early 1940s (which their
authors usually prefer) than for the poems he wrote later on.5 A wide
enough view of public life, one that includes not only campaigns and
elections but also the varied uses of public space, might expand what
we can see in his latest poems. To read the late poems in the light
of Stevens’s Connecticut is to see one more source for their sadness
and their consolations, one more model for their verbal powers. It is
also to see how that work can speak to recent debates about literature
and geography, literature and the environment, and literature and the
human body.

******

Stevens’s interest in places spanned his career, but his attitudes

towards particular places changed. “The Comedian As the Letter C”
(1922) begins with the claim, “Man is the intelligence of his soil,”
then follows its “poetic hero” Crispin on journeys through Southern
or tropical New World places; Crispin’s Northern “realist” household

ELH 77 (2010) 325–352 © 2010 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 325
and family, by the end of the narrative poem, may make him at last a
“profitless / Philosopher,” or end his poetic career (CPP, 29, 32, 37).
Through the 1930s, Stevens’s verse often marks its places as Southern
or Northern, with contrasts between lush but alien fertility and bleak
but familiar day-to-day life in a “North . . . of wintry slime,” even of
“academic death” (CPP, 98, 89). During the 1940s, as he pursued
genealogical research, Stevens often mentioned the region around
Reading, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. When the distinguished
Stevens scholar and editor Milton Bates writes of “Stevens as Regional
Poet,” the region is southeastern Pennsylvania: Thomas Lombardi has
since devoted a book to Stevens’s Pennsylvania roots.6 Yet Stevens’s
postwar letters track, if not a disaffection with genealogy, a detach-
ment from the place where he grew up: “When one has left home the
place naturally changes. What I had not realized” until returning to
Reading in 1946 (he told Judge Powell) “is that it keeps changing until
. . . the old familiar life of it is dead and gone.”7 Not Pennsylvania but
Connecticut had become his locale.
Though Stevens began to use New England place names as early
as Harmonium, only later did he learn to make whole poems from
subtler, and from more welcoming, reactions to the places where he
worked and lived. While the late poems have attracted superb com-
mentary since their publication, celebrations of how Stevens “dwelt in
Connecticut”—except for a few analyses of “An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven”—have not often drawn convincing connections between
individual poems and New England sites, digressing instead into
Heideggerian metaphysics or literary history.8 Yet in his late attention
to places in Connecticut, and in his final conception of Connecticut
as experience and idea (the self-irony in that phrase fits the poems),
Stevens became the regional poet that he once wanted Crispin to be.
Particular late poems draw on facts and impression of public places,
especially, but by no means only, within Elizabeth Park in Hartford.
The qualities that the older Stevens sometimes let himself cherish—
thinness, dailiness, routine, abstraction—as properly in and of Con-
necticut, properly his own, were the qualities he once saw as inimical
to poetry, the qualities that threatened to prevent the mature Crispin
from writing at all.9

******

The last poems, Eleanor Cook explains, “are poems of being at

home yet also of seeking home.”10 Yet “Stevens was a man without a

326 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

home,” as Helen Vendler writes; “he made a home instead from . . .
Elizabeth Park and the Connecticut River.”11 Designed between 1894
and 1897 by the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted (with his adopted son
John Olmsted taking the lead), Elizabeth Park was part of the much-
publicized “Rain of Parks” that changed the appearance of Hartford
at the turn of the twentieth century: it was “one of the most heavily
used parks in the city” when Wallace and Elsie Stevens purchased a
home nearby in 1932.12 Stevens not only walked through Elizabeth
Park to and from his office but “spent hours there, on weekends,
composing his poetry.”13 Elizabeth Park, Stevens told Barbara Church
in 1952, “is almost all there is in Hartford and I like it especially on
Sundays when people go there” (L, 761). In 1953 he saw “plants of
heath . . . in full bloom,” “notwithstanding the two freezing nights that
had covered the pond with ice several inches thick”: its festive plant
life and its place in the life of the city could make it an emblem for
plangency or for plenty, for survival or for bleak conditions, in winter
and in spring (L, 805).
That description echoes “The Plain Sense of Things,” a poem that
itself echoes the park’s history.14 This poem begins “as if / We had come
to an end,” and everything in it appears to be falling down:
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.
  (CPP, 428)

Stevens sets out to show that what looks like “an inert savoir,” a place
in the mind that seems entirely hostile to all joy, to all imaginative
figuration, and to all the mind’s attempts to rise above the world as
given, can become the ground for such attempts: the zero degree of
imagination remains enough, rightly seen, to block despair. “The great
pond, / The plain sense of it,” Stevens decides (repeating the noun
phrase “great pond”), “The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all
this / Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge, / Required, as
a necessity requires” (CPP, 428).
With its “plainness” of diction (no unusual words and no foreign
words except “savoir”; no verbs of action, save “come,” after the mid-
point of the poem), “The Plain Sense of Things” derives power instead
from its grammar. The first twelve lines, the case for desolation, turn

Stephen Burt 327

on present and present perfect verbs (“have fallen,” “return,” “has
become,” “walks,” “slants”), interrupted only by a gloomy subjunctive
construction (“It is as if / We had come to an end”). The last eight, with
their attempt at amor fati, repeat a preterite instead, even breaking
lines (twice) to emphasize the past tense “had”: “the absence of the
imagination had / To be imagined,” “all this / Had to be imagined.”
The poem rides, also, on its repeated adjectives, moving from “plain”
to “blank” to “great,” from “great” to “plain” to “great” (used with
some irony) to “inevitable.” The adjectives and the verb tenses tell
the same story: the poet despairs as he faces a wintry, failed, decaying
present, and then renders that present tolerable by envisioning it as
a possible future that must have been faced and accepted already by
someone some time ago.
That story reflects what the poet saw in Elizabeth Park, and what
he probably knew about its history. The park contains all the features
that Stevens describes: greenhouses, a “great structure” intended for
celebrations (the Pond Estate House), a pond, and gardens of annual
and perennial flora, including lilies (see figure 1).15 The greenhouses—
erected in the 1890s, and as old as the park itself—probably did need
paint by the early 1950s (they received their first important renova-
tions in 2005). And the Pond Estate House badly needed repairs: in
fact, it would soon be torn down. Built in 1846, the house began as
the home of Charles Pond, who bequeathed the land that became the
park. By 1952, “the floor sagged, and patrons complained of a musty
smell,” and “the deterioration of the house made it less and less at-
tractive.”16 Structural flaws found in March forced the city to stop
renting the building out for parties (thus “no turban walks across the
lessened floors”). George Hollister, the Superintendent of Parks, told
the City Manager in April 1952 that he wanted the structure razed,
declaring, “I am sure that the Elizabeth Park Pond House has outlived
its usefulness”; the building, he added, was “fast becoming a liability
and extensive repairs are needed to put it into safe condition.”17 The
shuttered edifice made news (even front-page news) repeatedly over
the following year, as the City Council debated whether or not to de-
stroy it: “Maybe what Hartford needs is a Bob Moses,” the Courant
editorialized, chillingly, in April 1953.18
B. J. Leggett sees in “The Plain Sense of Things” a Berkeleyan
argument for some inhuman creative observer (since the leaves, the
structure, and the rest “had to be imagined”).19 Even if we reject this
argument (which casts the poem, and late Stevens generally, in a sur-
prising light of religious orthodoxy), we might find in the same poem

328 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

Figure 1. Map of Elizabeth Park, Hartford, CT. Source: The Friends of Elizabeth
Park, http://www.elizabethpark.org/map_of_park.htm

questions about urban planning in winter-prone regions. “The absence

of the imagination,” the eventual collapse of the park (as of all human
makings) into entropic, nearly indescribable plainness, “had / Itself to
be imagined” beforehand. Stevens’s passive construction does not say
who had to imagine the plainness, nor how long ago. The poet may
thereby bring in the men who planned the park: John Olmsted, the
designer, if not Charles Pond, the donor, must have considered how
the park with its pond, trees, Estate House, and gazebo would look
decades hence, as its structures started to crumble, as well as how it
would look in drear-nighted December, after the last leaf lay on the
icy ground.
We might not think Stevens had seen Hartford in this way if he
had not also written “Postcard from the Volcano,” with its “dirty house
in a gutted world” whose quondam glories future “children . . . will
never know” (CPP, 128). As it is, “The Plain Sense of Things” sees
the wintry, muddy park as a Pompeii in the making, the Pond Estate
House as a future “abandoned mansion” (CPP, 128). To readers with

Stephen Burt 329

special interests in urban history (if to no others), the poem may even
feel proleptic, or anachronistic, in that it predicts the failure of urban
parks to humanize and keep attractive the core of an American city
from which industry has departed.20 Yet it would, of course, be wrong
to reduce any good poem to an account of the circumstances of its
origin, let alone a conjectural account. And it would be wrong to see
“The Plain Sense of Things,” a poem about “sadness” and disappoint-
ment in general, merely as a poem about one park. We can say instead
that Elizabeth Park and its history let Stevens write about repetition
and originality, creation and decay, as topics that arose in one place,
at one time.21
If “The Plain Sense of Things” is a poem of Elizabeth Park, then
“Vacancy in the Park,” “The Hermitage at the Center,” and “Nuns
Painting Water Lilies” all become its companion poems. “Nuns Painting
Water Lilies” (1950) grew from the poet’s observation: “Whenever I
saw” the nuns in the park, Stevens told the pious Thomas McGreevy
in August 1948, “I thought of the chasteness of things” (L, 610). These
nuns (who will not bear children of their own) resemble the “pods” on
the lilies in that both “are part of the growth of life within life”—water
lilies, not the lilies of Easter: depicting the “fleurettes” (and borrow-
ing vigorously from French), the nuns become “part of a fraicheur,”
a spring, which their chastity renders otherwise “inaccessible” (CPP,
456).22 “The Hermitage at the Center” (1952) includes not only the
uses other visitors found for the park, but also its design. Elizabeth
Park was known (like the Boston Public Garden) for its processions of
ducks: when Stevens would “sit on a bench by the pond” with Peter
Lee, the poet recalled in 1954, Lee “did not wait for the ducks to bring
him ideas” (CPP, 873). The poem includes both the ducks, and the
gazebo in the rose garden, situated at the center of a wheel-shaped
plan of paths whose trellised “spokes” extended outwards into a “ring”
(CPP, 430). An observer at the center of the Rose Garden would be
able to watch multiple simultaneous events—one source, perhaps, for
what Cook (following Vendler) calls its “intertwined double line” of
argument, with a “fugal” unison at the end.23
The poem incorporates not only the architecture in the garden,
which made such simultaneous observations possible, but also the
multiple figures that Stevens observes. At the opening of the poem,
“The leaves on the macadam make a noise” (the word “macadam,” in
Hartford at this time, would have connoted a city park).24 The leaves’
noise suggests entropy, “a great thing tottering”; the other presences in
the park, however—at first the reclining odalisque, “the desired,” and

330 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

then the birds who pay her tribute, the “lucent children,” along with
the ducks they feed—yield a complementary principle of renewal, so
that the poem juxtaposes (in Vendler’s words) “the daily impersonal
newness of the visible world” with the knowledge that all things will
someday grow old and cease.25 Stevens’s unusual double-columned
sentences, and his unusual indentations (the basis for a whole series
of two-columned poems by the contemporary poet Greg Williamson)
here suggest a spoke-and-wheel structure: the composition describes a
“ring” with a “hermitage” (perhaps remembering “Crispin as hermit”)
at its core, a temporary shelter from which the poet himself can see
the woman listening to the birds, and hear the “tintinnabula” of natural
and human sound (CPP, 32, 430).26
“The Hermitage” allows its three-line stanzas to end only once it has
included, like the Sphinx’s riddle, all three basic stages of life: “chil-
dren,” amorous adulthood (“the desired”), and old age, which looks,
as from a crooked tripod, at the other two. The Elizabeth Park poems,
considered as a group, show (to quote a chillier, earlier poem) “This As
Including That”; they suggest that Stevens calls into being for himself
and for any imagined readers a kind of figurative urban park, a space
analogous in imagination not to his house but to his Hartford, and a
space designed (like all successful city parks, and in contradistinction
to private houses) for multiple simultaneous uses, by people of dif-
ferent ages and tastes (CPP, 594).27 We might even say that Stevens
sponsors and makes, as he “wanted to make,” in verbal imagination, a
space with its flora and its shelters almost as Charles Pond sponsored,
and John Olmsted planned, a city park (CPP, 473).
“Vacancy in the Park” (1952) becomes the last poem in an Elizabeth
Park sequence: its sense of terminus provides one reason Stevens
placed it after “The Plain Sense of Things” when he arranged The Rock,
though he probably wrote “Vacancy” months earlier.28 Here Stevens,
the man who walks across the park in March, also looks back through
his own writing life. “Looking for he knows not what,” he compares
his quest, or else its object, to a vanished boat (an echo of “Prologues
to What Is Possible”), to a lost guitar (as in “The Man with the Blue
Guitar,” and in “Farewell Without a Guitar”), and then to a “feeling,”
“the feeling of a man / Come back to see a certain house,” who found
just a “rustic arbor” in its stead (CPP, 434, 437, 135, 461). Not the boat,
nor the guitar, but the feeling of the returning man matches the feeling
of the man in the park, because both men encounter the remains or
the ruined skeleton of the place that they had hoped to find—a place
associated, moreover, with weddings, which took place regularly, in
warm weather, at the gazebo and around the trellises.29
Stephen Burt 331
 What horrifies Stevens in this saddest of his Connecticut poems is
that the experience of this park, where he expected consolation, looks
too much like the experience of revisiting Reading, and too much
like the experience of coming home to an uncomprehending spouse.
Stevens had hoped earlier that the “wild poem” might “substitute /
For the woman one loves or ought to love,” and the disappointments
of domestic life find reinvigoration in his imaginative remakings of
places elsewhere (CPP, 219). In this poem all such hopes drain away.
The “rustic arbor” in this public park is neither a site for pastoral
courtship (like the remembered pagoda of another late poem) nor an
appropriate substitute for a private house. It is too much like a private
house, far too much like a bedroom, and in the wrong ways: the winds
blow “under” and through its imagined bed, “Under its mattresses of
vines” (CPP, 435; emphasis added).30 “Vacancy” is a bleak poem, at
home nowhere (with the additional suggestion of real estate vacancy:
the gazebo is unoccupied, so that someone else can move in, or get
married, there). Yet it also shows how thoroughly Stevens, in this park
if not in his own house, expected to feel at home.
Not all the Hartford poems involve the park. Cook has shown how
“St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” “reads” the Church of the
Good Shepherd, a Victorian Gothic structure on Wyllys Street in
Hartford (CPP, 448–49).31 A poem with more to say about Hartford
in general, and about what Stevens saw in southern New England, is
“On the Way to the Bus” (1954?). All Stevens’s critics note that he
took long walks to and from his office; few notice that he also took
city buses to work.32 Hartford in particular, and Stevens’s Connecticut
in general, becomes in his late poetry the place of routine, the setting
for “days [when] we give thanks for the office,” if not for the com-
mute: “What a profound grace it is to have a destiny no matter what
it is,” Stevens opined in 1954, “even the destiny of the postman going
the rounds and of the bus driver driving the bus,” the bus driver who
would never appear at the end of “On the Way to the Bus” (L, 843).
That poem—one of Stevens’s last, written after The Rock—speaks
to the poet’s sometime affection for Hartford; it also says something
about why Stevens continued, past the age of retirement and almost
until his death, to show up at work. How can the man on the way to
the bus, the “transparent man” (clear as ice or as frost, abstracted),
encounter the often “gloomy” obligations of the day (“journalism” in
the sense of dailiness, “jour”) and yet feel renewed?33
The answer lies in the “refreshment of cold air,” the newness “light
snow” brings, the way in which this commuter learns to hold himself

332 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

open to what this region can bring. This New England weather—not
rotten leaves, nor the inhuman cold of “The Snow Man,” but snow
light enough to dispel gloom—transforms the commuter’s mood. It lets
him live, moreover, with repetitions, the repetition of words (“cold”
appears three times, “perception” and “sleep” and the phrase “new
known” twice each) and the repetition of a morning routine that ends
at the office and begins “under the wintry trees” (CPP, 472). As in “An
Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” the ever-accumulating facts of public
history and “journalism” seem transitory and insignificant—whether
recorded in newsprint or in marble—beside the moment-to-moment
sensations that link (on a good day) our senses to our thought.34
Repetitions—of a workday, of a walker’s path, of a bus route, of a
mind pursuing its ideas—become in the 1950s a leitmotif for Stevens’s
Connecticut poems. Seven important words or parts of words—jour-
nalist/journalism, trans- (“transparent,” “translated”), “new known,”
cold, perception, sleep, power—recur at least once in the fourteen
lines of “On the Way to the Bus.” “The Plain Sense of Things” (plain,
in-, repetition, imagination/imagined, great, silence, require/ required)
and “Nuns Painting Water Lilies” (part, life, clearness, day) also unfold
around sets of repeated words. Such dense repetitions in his earlier
work often indicate special musical effects (as in the martial rhythms
of “Dry Loaf”) or else unmitigated frustration (as in “The American
Sublime”); in the poems of his last years (“Solitude Under the Oaks”
offers another example) they need do neither (CPP, 183, 106, 473).
Individual couplets within “On the Way to the Bus” juxtapose and
repeat paired nouns, as if the poet were learning a way of “pronounc-
ing” them, of living the same moment, the same walking path, and
the same day again and again. That day comes to exist, in an English-
French pun, “beyond journalism”: its most important words are never
printed as news, are not spoken at home, and may never be spoken
even in principle, never fully articulated, remaining still “inside of
one’s tongue” (CPP, 472).35
Stevensians will have expected my next example, “The River of
Rivers in Connecticut” (1953) (CPP, 451). Its placial interest comes
as no surprise—yet even here facts that Stevens would have known
inform the poem in ways that critics have missed. Beside Stevens’s
“great river this side of Stygia,” merely being alive and looking, without
teleology or even intention, includes delight: “the mere flowing of the
water is a gayety” (CPP, 451). This river of phenomenology, of life as
lived, “is not to be seen beneath the appearances / That tell of it.” It
is not what we see in reflections on its surface (where “The steeple at

Stephen Burt 333

Farmington / Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways”), nor
is it fully separable from them: in the same way, a life is not identical
with the external, recorded events it contains, and exceeds any single,
specific term. Thus Stevens calls the river’s essence “unnamed”:
It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.
(CPP, 451)

A latter-day consensus has it that the river which Stevens instructs

us not to name (a successor, in this “paean to vitalism,” to Stevens’s
earlier “river R”) is not “associated with any particular river”; Haddam
lies on the Connecticut River, but Farmington lies on the eponymous
tributary, miles away (CPP, 427).36
And yet an observed river, too, seems to shine in those lines. The
Connecticut River is, and since prehistory has been, tidal, from Long
Island Sound up to Windsor Locks, fourteen miles north of Hartford.
That is, it flows to the sea at ebb tide, but reverses direction when
the tide comes in. The name “Connecticut,” in fact, comes from a
Mohegan term that may mean “Long Tidal River”; the derivation is
widespread in oral tradition—official tourism documents call it part
of the state’s “folk-lore.”37
It must be in this sense, among others, that the Connecticut River
“flows nowhere, like a sea” (CPP, 451). To appreciate life as like a tidal
river is to appreciate a life that requires no immanent purpose, and no
consistent direction, in order for us to prefer it strongly to death: in a
reversal at the end of the poem, the “propelling force” that makes a
ferry impractical has no direction of its own. Stevens thus introduces
a gentle irony by concluding with repeated imperatives (“Call it . . .
Call it, again and again”), making them the only such verbs in the
poem.38 Rather than leading to some other land, some Stygia, as the
one-way flow of any human life leads to death, this river links up with
the sea (and the Sound) that it already resembles, since both invite
our contemplation without telling us where to go. If “like a sea” con-
notes magnitude, or scope, then Stevens may even be asking us to
suspend, and then again bestow, on this long tidal river, its proper
name. The river of rivers is thus, in Barbara Fisher’s words, “the Con-
necticut River and . . . more,” a descendant of the rivers in earlier

334 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

poems drawn both from Pennsylvania and from New England.39 Even
the absent ferryman—an avatar, of course, of the absent Charon—
has an additional basis in local fact: most of the ferry services across
the Connecticut River closed during Stevens’s lifetime, replaced by
bridges meant for automobiles. The ferry at Hadlyme, where East
Haddam meets Lyme, was the “last of the time-honored transports,”
one chronicler wrote in 1939.40
Stevens told Renato Poggioli that he wrote “The River of Rivers”
“especially” for him to translate into Italian; Poggioli gave it pride of
place in his bilingual edition of Stevens’s poems. (L, 778, 784).41 When
we set “The River of Rivers” within its occasion (Stevens’s promise to
send Poggioli a poem) and beside Stevens’s own hunger for exotica
from correspondents overseas (such as Leonard van Geysel, José Ro-
driguez Feo, Thomas McGreevy and Peter Lee) we might see beneath
its register of symbols more “local color” than most critics assume,
as if the poet projected his own desire for views from distant places
onto the urbane Italian to whom he wrote.42 After Poggioli’s query
about the “thin men of Haddam” in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird,” both the “completely Yankee” qualities of Connecticut and
the location of Haddam would have been in Stevens’s mind (L, 784).
A handwritten letter to Poggioli (not included in the published Let-
ters) responds to a draft translation: “[I]ntelligence,” Stevens explains,
“refers to the distortion of trees not growing in conditions natural to
them and not to houses deprived of a setting of trees.”43 The trees in
“The River of Rivers,” which do not lack “intelligence,” are “growing
in conditions natural to them”: they belong—as Stevens now imagines
that he belongs—in the state where they live.44
Stevens looked at Connecticut when other people expected poems
from him. “River of Rivers” fulfilled a promise to Poggioli; “An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven” began as a commission from the New Haven-
based Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences.45 The latter poem
begins and ends with the “plain,” the “transparent,” the “plainness of
plain things,” of “plain men in plain towns,” seeking in a late autumn
“barrenness” an explanation for, if not a stay against, its frequently
bleak mood (CPP, 397, 398, 399, 416). On the one hand the urban
scene and season suggest “misery”; on the other, they inspire a “late
style [that] at its most pure and most successful” becomes “forbiddingly
theoretical,” in Vendler’s words, as if this city, with its centuries-old
grid plan and its academic edifices, fit abstract language especially well
(CPP, 398).46 Since this long poem has attracted so many attentive
readings already, and because it does not draw on little-known facts

Stephen Burt 335

about places close to Stevens’s home, I do not discuss it at length here,
though it too, in its manifold speculations, takes frequent interest in
public, outdoor space.47
Written for the Voice of America, and published also in the Hartford
Courant, “Connecticut Composed” (1955) is the last piece of prose
that Stevens completed, and probably his last completed writing of
any sort (CPP, 894, 975).48 What Stevens says there about Connecticut
sums up the impressions given in the poems he wrote about it years
before. His adopted state is a place of “thrift and frugality,” of “spare
colors,” “thin lights,” “thin and difficult . . . soil” (CPP, 894–95). A
train ride from Hartford to Boston via Willimantic in April makes the
state as materia poetica seem poor indeed: “Everything seemed gray,
bleached and derelict, and the [dactylic] word derelict kept repeating
itself as part of the activity of the train.”
And yet, Stevens says, “this was a precious ride through the char-
acter of the state” (CPP, 894). How so? “The man who loves New
England and particularly the spare region of Connecticut” (spare, that
is, compared to the Berkshires or to Vermont, as in “July Mountain”)
“loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin lights, the
delicacy and slightness of the beauty of the place” (CPP, 895, 476).
The quintessence of Connecticut hence becomes most apparent in
seasons and scenes of austerity, of colors so thin and natural vigor so
weak as to require work (mental or physical) before they can become
evident at all. In such places—but not in the tropics, and not in the
mountains—“the reward of discipline is visible and tangible, or seems
to be” (CPP, 895).
For “discipline” we may read not only “thrift and frugality” but also
intellectual effort, even abstraction. As a place of abstraction—of hard
thought and hard work— Stevens’s Connecticut is inviting: “Once
you are here you are or you are on your way to become a Yankee”
(CPP, 895). It is not something Stevens would have said about Read-
ing, much less about the South. Connecticut rewards persistence and
intellection: its mentality is something one may adopt, as one adopts
a belief or a habit, not something one must inherit. In that way it
resembles other immigrant destinations, and may be viewed as one
modern city, a meta-Hartford of sorts: “a single metropolis, highly
industrial,” “an industrial and business center” like the “Oxidia” of Ste-
vens’s earlier verse (CPP, 866).49 “Going back to Connecticut,” Stevens
concludes, “is a return to an origin,” but an origin that “many men all
over the world” can claim. Because abstract, amenable to intellection,
the adopted state could welcome its resident, who could no longer

336 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

return even in imagination to the Bucks and Berks Counties, places
of unbroken familial rootedness, that he once called home; because
in itself austere, yet capable of spring (a watercolor spring, Stevens
adds), Connecticut could suit a poet whose interest in spring would
always be qualified (as Vendler and George Lensing have shown at
length) by the austerities of his own temperament. The spareness, the
proximity to abstraction, that Stevens saw in Connecticut let him find
there a ground for his late poems.50

******

The late poems of Connecticut chorography not only reflect the

sense of emplacement that Stevens found there in some moods; they
solve a creative problem—and alleviate the misery—raised by others.
Stevens told the Cuban poet and editor José Rodriguez Feo that “Cuba
should be full of Cuban things” (L, 495). Yet the Stevens of the letters,
like the Stevens of the poems, remained of two minds about whether
Hartford in particular and New England in general could permit a
Connecticut poet to fill his poems with Connecticut things. October
1948 finds him “saying to myself pretty constantly that life is a dull
life”: “the long spell of dry weather” is “not at all good for a man liv-
ing in a very small spot and disliking aridity and monotony” (L, 620).
Hartford, Stevens told Rodriguez Feo, was “presumably an insensi-
tive mass of insensitive people,” as opposed either to Princeton or to
“Havana where poets are like vines that bring color to the structure
of the place out of the soil of Cuba” (L, 623–24).
The same letter of 1948 suggests nonetheless that no poet could
accomplish much without an imaginative belonging in some place:
“one never really writes about life when it is someone else’s life. . . .
One writes about it when it is one’s own life provided one is a good
barbarian, a true Cuban, or a true Pennsylvania Dutchman” (L, 624).
Stevens’s genealogical researches included attempts to prove himself
“truly” Dutch-American, to qualify for the Holland Society (he never,
in fact, qualified). He did not belong in Reading, and was no farmer.
If Hartford, Connecticut, and New England encouraged “combat”
against reality rather than a bringing forth of imaginative fruit, what
was the poet—who still had to live there—to do? (L, 611)
Some late poems and prose, I have been arguing, solve that
problem by means of a fruitful paradox: to be a citizen of Stevens’s
“Oxidian” state, to be the right man for this “unpropitious place,” is
to see asceticism, repetition and “plainness” as themselves compos-

Stephen Burt 337

ing the spirit proper to this place—the basis, one might add, for its
“mythology.” “A Mythology Reflects Its Region” (1955?)—which Joan
Richardson calls “almost a companion piece” to the essay for radio
about Connecticut—may be the last verse that Stevens wrote.51 Its
anomalous form—untitled, and breaking off in the midst of a blank
verse line—implies that the poet did not consider it finished, though
(as with Keats’s “This Living Hand”) later readers may see in it an
imaginative unity nonetheless. The lines fit the otherwise-unused
“Absence of Mythology,” the next-to-last entry in Stevens’s list of
potential titles for poems.52
The word “mythology,” like the word “intelligence,” took on, for
Stevens, unusual resonance. “I finished [Jean] Paulhan’s Causes Célè-
bres a week or so ago,” Stevens told Barbara Church in 1950: “what
particularly interested me was the frequency of idioms,” among them
“the one about the mythological background (or myth) of a local ritual
in a river” (L, 690). The letter is bland, but the ritual (“Orpaillargues”)
is bizarre, its “mythe” (the only use of the word in that book) one
Paulhan all but admits that he cannot interpret. Before each wedding
in a French village, a mannequin identical to the bride is constructed
and then ritually spurned, cast adrift on a river: “On ne sait trop non
plus ce qui attendait, dans cette région, les jeunes mariées.”53 By the
time he read Causes Célèbres, Stevens had already written a poem
about a similarly bizarre ritual in Pennsylvania: “An Entirely New Set
of Objects,” with its haunting procession of men in canoes, remembers
an annual “celebration in Reading during which men in canoes and
other vessels would float down the Schuylkill at night carrying candle-
lit Chinese lanterns.”54
“Here / In Connnecticut,” by contrast, “we never lived in a time /
When mythology was possible” (CPP, 476). If Connecticut is a region
fit for introversion, for austere imagining, and for hard work, and if
“a mythology reflects its region,” what would a Connecticut mythol-
ogy be? (CPP, 476) How could the Connecticut or the Farmington
River have—how could such a state, such rivers, ever have had—myth
and ritual to match Paulhan’s, or even to match Reading’s? Stevens’s
“antimythological” answer is that C for Crispin, C for Connecticut (a
state never named in “The Comedian”), could have no such myth: it
is, instead, in “A Mythology Reflects Its Region,” a place for the plain
sense of things, for life without supernatural teleology, life lived and
worked through in the knowledge that the only thing beyond it is death.
Under these fields and these rivers lies only mere being; under that,
nothing but stones. The lines contain only three verbal adjectives, all

338 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

implying comparisons (“increased,” “heightened,” “freshened”), and no
adjective of any other kind, as if to reflect the austerity of their site.
Yet a Connecticut austerity ends up, once again, not grim but consol-
ing: its “freshened” satisfactions reflect a place-attachment achieved.
Repetitions (“mythology,” “region,” “image,” “nature,” “creator”) make
way for simple nouns that occur once apiece. Charles Berger sees in “A
Mythology” a rectangular tombeau (in the French tradition of memorial
poems), as well as a symbolic tombstone: “the substance of his region”
means, for Berger, “both . . . the place of burial and the materials
out of which the tomb sculpture is fashioned,” as “Stevens bequeaths
himself to his land.”55 Stevens sees himself living on “in the substance
of his region,” in woods, in stone from the stony New England “fields
/ Or from under his mountains” (CPP, 476). Stevens thus names the
properties that make this state fit his tomb: its stoniness, its fitness to
abstraction, and the sense, which emerges even from this fragment,
that Connecticut neither suits nor requires lushly reticulated surfaces,
but sends us instead to a “substance” underneath.
Tim Armstrong writes that nineteenth-century American poets’
“celebration of the wintriness of the New England tradition” becomes
for some modernists, Stevens among them, an enabling “reduction
of the landscape to a ‘blank’ scene,” “a contemplation of a landscape
which has in fact been cleared, reduced to an abstract pattern, a blank
page—as in the snowscape, in the writing of the North.”56 Armstrong’s
remarkable essay on American poets of snow, from Ralph Waldo Em-
erson to Alfred Corn, makes heavy weather of Stevens’s “The Snow
Man.” Stevens’s own first example of an American poem, in 1950, is
John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Snow-Bound” (his second is Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass) (CPP, 829). But Stevens’s interest in New England
extends beyond weather, into the built environment, and into hills and
stones: it would be better to say, for late Stevens, not a New England
blankness but a New England asceticism, a frame containing a few thin
lines, rather than none. The last poems raise not questions of philo-
sophical priority so much as of the verbal fit between temperament
and locale, the fit which the late poems of public space, of Connecticut
places named and “unnamed,” demonstrate.
In another late prose composition, “John Crowe Ransom, Tennes-
sean,” Stevens writes that “one turns with something like ferocity toward
a land that one loves, to which one is really and essentially native”
(CPP, 820). James Longenbach finds that such declarations of satisfac-
tion with Ransom’s supposed Tennessee sit sadly besides the “jokes”
in Stevens’s late letters about “the thinness of his own experience.”57

Stephen Burt 339

If Ransom’s poems are “composed of Tennessee,” how could Stevens’s
poems, given his tendency towards abstraction, compose themselves of
any place at all? The answer he finds in his late work—an answer not
present in his earlier poems of Northern unease—is that the poems
are indeed composed of Connecticut, because the austerity, the Prot-
estant self-control, the spareness and thinness of their language (once
the countervailing drive to luxurious diction in the earlier Stevens fell
away) fit the poet, who thereby fit the place.

******

The philosopher J. E. Malpas argues that any subjectivity—any

consciousness, any action, and any representation of either—requires
implicit concepts of space and place: “there is no possibility of under-
standing human . . . thought and experience . . . other than through an
understanding of place and locality.”58 Malpas’s argument (conducted
in part through debates internal to analytic philosophy, as a response
to P. F. Strawson) distinguishes rectilinear, gridded, abstract “space”
from identifiable, intuitive “place,” and then suggests that the con-
cepts objective and subjective, space and time, self and other, spatial
and placial, all depend upon one another, so that we cannot have
one without all the rest: “these elements are themselves established
only in relation to each other, and so only within the topographical
structure of place.”59 Whether or not a particular individual feels
especially attached to a particular place, Malpas argues, “we are the
sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only
in virtue of our active engagement in place.”60 When we imagine a
person, Malpas concludes, we envision that person somewhere, here
and not there, even if that “where” is uncomfortable, or impossible to
sustain, or altered in the course of the work we read.
To make such claims so baldly is to make nonsense of a great deal of
lyric poetry. Where, exactly, does George Herbert’s “Virtue” take place?
Some poems have settings, real (William Wordsworth on Westminster
Bridge) or obviously fictionalized (the Brontës’ Gondal); of others we
can say only that the poet may speak and be heard—as Christina Ros-
setti wrote—“Somewhere or Other.”61 We can also, though, say that
the more a poet feels that literature or consciousness require some
orientation in place or in space, the more a poet might feel uneasy
about his own tendency towards abstraction, and the more he might
take an interest in signals and figures of place. Such a progression
seems to have happened to Stevens, especially, but not exclusively,
in the last years of his life. The opposition placial vs. spatial, a sense

340 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

of presence in a specific locale versus a sense that all locations feel
alike, can even replace, in Stevens’s late poetry, the earlier opposition
of South vs. North. “It makes so little difference,” he writes in “Long
and Sluggish Lines,” “where one looks, one has been there before”:
this poem of repetitions, whose “trees . . . kept saying over and over
one same, same thing,” concludes only once it fastens on aspects (such
as the “yellow . . . side of a house”) particular to a place (CPP, 442–43;
emphasis added).
At least one of Stevens’s poems from the 1940s arrives, dejectedly
(since the poem itself contains no signs of place-attachment), at some-
thing like Malpas’s implausible conclusion. There are no convincingly
imagined domains, “Crude Foyer” argues, except those we derive from
places we have known firsthand: any “landscape of the mind” is at its
root “a landscape only of the eye” (CPP, 270). A much longer poem
from Transport to Summer, “Description Without Place,” pursues the
opposite argument: “seeming is description without place,” “the future
is description without place,” and “an artificial thing that exists / In its
own seeming” may become “Intenser than any actual life could be”
(CPP, 301). Even this poem in its confident peroration returns to the
notion of place-attachment, of poets (or even “men”) who speak from
and of real places—it is simply that their words create, or re-create,
the place. “The hard hidalgo / Lives in the mountainous character of
his speech” (Stevens may have in mind the Pyrenees). Yet (compared
to “The Comedian” or to “Crude Foyer”) the line of causality between
earthly site and imaginative language has been reversed: here even
a “Spaniard” learns to see Spain above all through “descriptions” of
Spain.62 We can therefore see (or “see”) vividly not only the places
where we might travel or settle, but also domains where our bodies
cannot go— “the past,” for example, and “the future,” and (for Stevens)
Ceylon, Havana, Spain (CPP, 302). Such an artificial domain, though
only “a cast // Of the imagination, made in sound,” may nonetheless “Be
alive with its own seemings, seeming to be / Like rubies reddened by
rubies reddening” (CPP, 302). The confident symmetries of Stevens’s
conclusion (whose apparent endorsement of the autotelic imagination
raises the ire of socially minded critics) fend off the pessimism pro-
jected by such late poems of displacement and loneliness as “Crude
Foyer” and “Debris of Life and Mind.” We might even see “Crude
Foyer” and the last part of “Description Without Place” as thesis and
antithesis, opposites reconciled by such later, chorographic poems as
“The River of Rivers,” whose landscapes of the mind are also, but not
only, landscapes of the eye.63

Stephen Burt 341

 From “The Comedian” to “Description Without Place” to “The
River of Rivers,” Stevens’s poems include problems of place-relations:
how to describe bad ones, how to discover and then to describe good
ones. Wesley Kort, who has considered such matters at length, calls
bad place-relations “alienating,” and good ones “accommodating”: a
good place, a place that seems to be right for us, is one where we
feel at home, and one within which we feel mobile, relatively un-
constrained.64 Connecticut gave the later Stevens an accommodating
stage for thinking about place-relations, because its muted tones, its
combination of comfort and discomfort, placed it between nowhere
and somewhere, between a too strongly colored, too vivid, locality (as
in his earlier poems of an overripe Florida) and a sometimes confound-
ingly placeless mental life.
A sense of betweenness, of transition, of such edges and intermedi-
ate zones as those between home and away, fall and winter, winter and
spring, often informs the ideas about place in late Stevens, both the
ideas about places that his poems favor and their ideas of the poet’s
divided states of mind. As Kevin Lynch notes in his classic of urban
planning, The Image of the City, walkers in urban places (including
parks) seek a “distinctive and legible environment,” creating their own
mental maps composed of “path, landmark, edge, node and district.”65
The city and the legible parts thereof, in Lynch’s model, are made up
not so much of destinations and regions but of ways to get between one
destination and another: such transitions characterize our experience
of urban public space. “Paths with clear and well-known origins and
destinations . . . helped tie the city together and gave the observer a
sense of his bearing.”66 Poems of geographic transitional space—of a
foyer, a pond’s margin, a long riverbank—become for Stevens poems
about that other boundary that vexes so many of his poems, the line
between a mostly solitary inner life and the resonances it seeks in
outward space.
No wonder, then, that Stevens’s late work so often depicts edges and
paths, along with structures and sites appropriate to them: figurative
“thresholds” (as in the opening stanza of “To an Old Philosopher in
Rome”), literal sites of embarkation, such as a bus stop or a riverbank,
or semi-enclosed structures, such as gazebos, porches or foyers, in
which we may stop but not remain. “Just as the child in transitional
space exists between harsh external reality and self-serving internal
fantasy,” writes the philosopher Edward Casey, “so the person on the
porch—or in other comparable intermediate places—exists between
private and public or between the rigors of the journey and the com-

342 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

forts of inhabitation.”67 The health of the foyers, paths and edges in
Stevens—are they decrepit, as in “The Plain Sense of Things”? or
refreshing, as in “On the Way to the Bus”?—becomes an index for
Stevens’s psyche, for the comfort, or lack of it, in his later work.68 “To
an Old Philosopher in Rome” begins as a poem of urban and of figura-
tive “thresholds” (Stevens’s own repeated term) and allows its excurses
to conclude only when the end it imagines for George Santayana’s life
can integrate interior and exterior, mental refuge, domestic interior,
and urban space, conceiving “the life of the city” as continuous with
the life of the mind, and as “part of the life in your room” (CPP, 431,
434). The man of “Local Objects” is “a spirit without a foyer,” until he
makes his own “absolute foyer” out of the things for which he finds
fresh names (CPP, 473–74). And the automobile passenger of “Reality
Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”—Stevens’s last poem
to include the name of a city, and a poem that distinguishes Hartford
and Cornwall, Connecticut from glamorous cities overseas—finds
that transitional health, that “vigor of glory,” in a passing landscape
that suits Stevens in part because it is so austere as to seem almost
nonphysical, an “insolid” space for the life of the mind: “an argentine
abstraction approaching form / And suddenly denying itself away”
(CPP, 471–72).
New readings of durable poems are ends in themselves, as is new
evidence about the circumstances of their making. This evidence about
Stevens and Connecticut, Stevens and the sense of place, should also
show those readers who want such evidence how Stevens’s late work
speaks to matters of public space, and hence of public life. Stevens’s
chorographic late poems, moreover, speak to two other projects current
in literary studies generally, projects that have not heretofore found
much room for him. First, to see Stevens as a poet of place-attachment
is to see his relevance to ecocriticism. Lawrence Buell recommends
that “literature and environment studies . . . reckon more fully with
the interdependence between urban and outback landscapes,” and that
critics seek out works that “put ‘green’ and ‘brown’ landscapes, the
landscapes of exurbia and industrialization, in conversation with each
other.”69 Stevens’s late work attends to the interlocking properties of
rivers and towns, parkland and cityscape, “Oxidian” development and
“natural nakedness” (CPP, 149, 430). His New England poetry—most
of all “The River of Rivers”—becomes what Buell calls “watershed lit-
erature,” connecting components of the Connecticut River system from
Long Island Sound to New Hampshire and Vermont.70 Stevens’s late
verse of accommodation to his adopted “origin,” his austere southern

Stephen Burt 343

New England, with its steeples, reflections and ponds, indeed shows
“copresence of ‘built’ and ‘natural’ elements,” where “everywhere is
either upstream or downstream (or both) from somewhere else.”71
Second, and perhaps more surprising, to see how Stevens’s lines
address the particular spaces through which he moved is to think again
about poems and bodies. Recent theorists of lyric poetry sometimes
propose that poems resemble, and that they help us imagine, human
bodies. For Susan Stewart, “[D]ivergence in lyric is not between
language and music but between . . . the somatic [and] the social”;
making poetry is like breathing life into matter, so that the theory of
lyric must include an “ontology of myths of animation.”72 Stevens in
old age feared that he had chosen “not to live / In a physical world,”
that he had deleted the somatic from his poetry and from his life
(CPP, 286). One of his most often quoted late poems asks: “I wonder,
have I lived a skeleton’s life / As a disbeliever in reality, // A countryman
of all the bones in the world?” (CPP, 598). His readers have at times
asked similar questions: the generally sympathetic Bart Eeckhout notes
other critics’ complaints that Stevens’s oeuvre lacks “real people of flesh
and blood.”73 Desolation, abandonment and loneliness (as in “Debris
of Life and Mind” or “Vacancy in the Park”) are feelings as “real” as
joy: readers who have not found vivid feelings in Stevens’s last poems
have not looked very hard. Yet we may ask, with “As You Leave the
Room,” whether the poems take account of somatic experience, and
especially whether they include its pleasures.
Stevens’s late poetry of Connecticut finds, indeed, such feelings, but
only if we think in the right way about what “the body” means. His
poems of weather and site find “part of a major reality” in “snow” and
rain, in water and air in motion, in “weather after it has cleared,” in
walking through Hartford or New Haven, riding in an automobile or
standing still in a park (CPP, 598, 474). To understand what happens
to the poet’s imagined body, to understand the feelings (the “refresh-
ment” in “On the Way to the Bus,” for example) that precede intel-
lection and which the poem attempts to explain, we have to conceive
of that body as including the natural and architectural elements that
affect its disposition in space. Stevens’s late poems of Connecticut thus
project, at times, what the visual artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa
call the “architectural body”: “embodied mind,” as Gins and Arakawa
explain, “extends out beyond the body-proper into the architectural
surround.”74 In terms used by another theorist of embodiment, Clau-
dia Benthien, the body of the pedestrian in “On the Way to the Bus”
rides on, rather than within, and not as something trapped inside, the

344 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

skin.75 Such poems thus fit Gins and Arakawa’s “architectural body
hypothesis” (which they also call a “sited awareness hypothesis”), by
which where you are, how you are remade by a site, may become part
of what you take your body to be.
Not all Stevens’s late poems support such a claim about bodies,
but the ones that do are, not by coincidence, those most closely tied
to places, if not to place names. “Reality Is an Activity of the Most
August Imagination” comes to mind again here, along with “The River
of Rivers.” So does “Artificial Populations”: the “artificial population”
Stevens there discovers at his own “centre” “is like / A healing-point in
the sickness of the mind,” because it heals the false distinction between
mind and bodies, the distinction that a too narrow (or too simply sexu-
alized) view of the body creates. The poems of place-attachment from
Stevens’s last years become (in a phrase that suits Stevens’s late poetry
generally) what Gins and Arakawa call “tentative constructings towards
holdings in place,” expressions of “organism-environment-person.”76
Such poems of margins, riverbanks, roads and paths include—in
another Stevensian formulation—“the things that in each other are
included,” air and earth and water, mind and body, and landscape and
place (CPP, 348). To see Stevens only in this way would be wrong (it
would, among other problems, efface the loneliness that underlies
even such consolatory poems as “The Hermitage at the Center”). To
see him this way among others is to see with new emphasis how his
poems pursue “the metaphysical changes that occur / Merely in living
as and where we live” (CPP, 287, emphasis added).
“I have no wish to arrive at a conclusion,” Stevens told Bernard
Heringman; it is an admonition Stevens’s interpreters have not always
kept in mind (L, 710). Once on the trail of Connecticut in late Stevens,
we might see traces of it in other poems, even those that include no
urban properties and no proper nouns. “The image of New England
in early spring,” Stevens told Thomas McGreevy in April 1954, “is an
image not yet exploited” (L, 827). He exploited that image in “Not
Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself,” which begins “At the
earliest ending of winter,” though he returned to the imagined South
of Harmonium for “Of Mere Being,” probably the last completed poem
of all (CPP, 451, 476). “A Discovery of Thought,” a poem from 1950
about “the antipodes of poetry, dark winter,” in which “the houses of
New England catch the first sun,” becomes not only a poem for the
winter solstice (compare Keats’s “In drear-nighted December” and
Williams’ “These / are the desolate dark weeks”) but a poem about a
New England Christmas: in it Stevens imagines what a spare, effort-

Stephen Burt 345

ful, reticent, secularized Connecticut version of the Christ child would
be (CPP, 459).77 Stevens’s late lyric poems for his adopted state do
not fit together into one mood, nor do they add up to one consecu-
tive argument. They do, however, support claims about how Stevens
could see Connecticut, and about how Stevens saw certain sites within
Connecticut, during the late 1940s and 1950s. This state fit this poet
because, for him, its very particulars tended towards abstraction. Its
spare, thin colors, its bidirectional river, its major park and aging minor
structures, had become the poet’s own.
Harvard University
notes
My thanks to Bart Eeckhout, Nick Halpern and Helen Vendler for their encouraging
comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Rich-
ardson (New York: Library of America, 1997), 901. Hereafter abbreviated CPP and
cited parenthetically by page number.
2 
T. F. Lombardi, “Wallace Stevens: At Home in Pennsylvania,” Wallace Stevens
Journal 2 (1978): 16. Lombardi cites Stevens’s 1935 letter to J. R. L. Latimer: “While,
of course, my imagination is a most important factor, nevertheless I wonder whether,
if you were to suggest any particular poem, I could not find an actual background
for you” (Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens [Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1969], 289. Hereafter abbreviated L and cited parenthetically by page number).
Eleanor Cook finds in Stevens a “profound sense of place, historical, social, physical
and so on” (Poetry, Word-Play and Word-War in Wallace Stevens [Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1988], 14). For another valuable examination of Stevens’s sense of place,
in general, see Barbara Fisher, Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous (Charlot-
tesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1990), 107–27. On Stevens and the idea of landscape
in art, see Bonnie Costello, Shifting Ground (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2003),
53–85. A recent overview of work on Stevens and place is John Serio’s introduction to
the special issue of The Wallace Stevens Journal devoted to “Poetics of Place,” though
the special issue itself has little to say about how the poems—apart from “An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven”—use places in Connecticut. See John Serio, “Introduction:
A Personal Reflection,” Wallace Stevens Journal 27 (2003): 3–6.
3 
The best collection of such facts is now Eleanor Cook, A Reader’s Guide to Wallace
Stevens (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007).
4 
On Stevens and Hartford, see Samuel French Morse, “A Sense of Place,” in The
Motive for Metaphor, ed. Francis Blessington and Guy Rotella (Boston: Northeastern
Univ. Press, 1983), 4–25; on Stevens and Connecticut in general, see also William
Doreski, “Wallace Stevens in Connecticut,” Twentieth-Century Literature 39 (1993):
152–65; Lawrence Kramer, “‘A Completely New Set of Objects’: The Sense of Place in
Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives,” in Critical Essays on Wallace Stevens, ed. Steven
Axelrod and Helen Deese (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 213–30; and James Baird, The
Dome and the Rock (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), 231–42.
5 
See, especially, Alan Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1991) and James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain

346 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

Sense of Things (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); more recent examples include
Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, The Violence Within, the Violence Without (Athens: Univ.
of Georgia Press, 2003); and Lee M. Jenkins, Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order (Hove:
Sussex Academic Press, 1999). For an earlier, polemical, and for a time influential study
of Stevens and politics (one which also deprecates the poems of his last phase), see
Frank Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
6 
“What he called his ‘unique and solitary home’” in “The Poem that Took the Place
of a Mountain,” Bates explains, “was not the Pennsylvania of his boyhood, exactly,
but a paysage imaginaire that derived from it” (Milton J. Bates, “Stevens as Regional
Poet,” Wallace Stevens Journal 5 [1981]: 35). The best and most recent treatment of
Stevens and Pennsylvania emphasizes his sense that, there, “many generations that have
dwelled” in the same place established imaginative roots in the land (Justin Quinn,
“Family and Place in Wallace Stevens,” Wallace Stevens Journal 27 [2003]: 65). Lombardi
argues that Stevens’s continued attachment to southeastern Pennsylvania precluded
any attachment to New England, even up to the end of his life. See Lombardi, Wal-
lace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone (Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna Univ. Press,
1996), 26, 29–31, 220–21. Other treatments of Stevens and Pennsylvania include Jay
Semel, “Pennsylvania Dutch Country: Stevens’s World as Meditation,” Contemporary
Literature 14 (1973): 310–19; and Charles J. Adams III, “Wallace Stevens: Poet Laureate
of the Pennsylvania 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 early reaction to Stevens’s last
poems is Randall Jarrell’s 1955 “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens” (The Third
Book of Criticism [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969], 55–76). The most im-
portant extended study of the last poems remains Helen Vendler, Words Chosen Out
of Desire (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986); the most recent of interest is B. J.
Leggett, Late Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2005). Some relevant
and detailed readings of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” are Keith Mannecke,
“Wallace Stevens’s ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’: The ‘Inescapable Romance’
of Place,” Wallace Stevens Journal 27 (2003): 80–96; Roger Gilbert, Walks in the World
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), 75–106; Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The
Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), 305–37; Helen Vendler, On
Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’s Longer Poems (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1969), 269–308; and Ronald Sukenick, Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure (New
York: New York Univ. Press, 1967), 167–86.
9 
On Stevens’s abstract or “algebraic . . . sort of poetry,” see especially Vendler, Words
Chosen Out of Desire, 8. Charles Altieri, by contrast, opposes Stevens’s “abstraction” not
to particularity in character, setting or story, but to “humanism” (“Why Stevens Must
Be Abstract, or What a Poet Can Learn from Painting,” in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics
of Modernism, ed. Albert Gelpi [Cambridge: Cambridge 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 (Columbus: 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 literary visitor in 1952 to Elizabeth Park “to
see a tree,” a larch (Brazeau, 134). Stevens also visited Elizabeth Park on a “Sunday

Stephen Burt 347

morning walk” that he described in 1950 to Barbara Church: “I tried to pretend that
everything in nature is artificial and that everything artificial is natural, as, for example,
that the roses in Elizabeth Park are placed there daily by some lover of mankind and
that Paris is an eruption of nature” (L, 684).
14 
George Lensing connects it to “Stevens’s own blank state of mind in the fall of
1952, especially as he walked through the familiar Elizabeth Park feeling keenly his
. . . isolation” (Wallace Stevens and the Seasons [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.
Press, 2001], 62). “The pond of the mind,” agrees Bonnie Costello, “begins in Elizabeth
Park”; her brief reading focuses instead on contrasts between Stevens and Thoreau
(70–72). Robert Pack emphasizes the same poem’s “human need for connection with
the physical 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. My thanks to Cornelio for our telephone conversation in December
2007 about the history of the park. The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to Con-
necticut, published in 1938, touts Elizabeth Park for its “rose-beds,” “hothouses and
experimental houses” (Connecticut: Its Roads, Lore and People [Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1938], 189).
16 
Cornelio, Elizabeth Park, 23.
17 
“Hollister Favors Razing Pond House,” Hartford Courant, 3 April 1952, 19.
18 
A few years later the house was indeed destroyed; the current Pond House is a
recent replacement. “Can’t Something Be Done with the Pond House?” Hartford
Courant, 25 June 1953, 12; Roger Dove, “100 Elderlies Ask Council to Save Park
House,” Hartford Courant, 24 June 1953, 1.
19 
Leggett, Late Stevens, 16–19.
20 
During Stevens’s adulthood, the suburbs of Hartford grew fast, but the city itself
had not yet begun to shrink. See Malcolm Johnson, Yesterday’s Connecticut (Miami:
E. A. Seemann, 1976), 119.
21 
Bart Eeckhout, following Cook, notes a play throughout “The Plain Sense of
Things” with the sound “in,” as if Stevens himself, or his monitory 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 for a rat to eat. See Eeckhout, Wallace Stevens
and the Limits of Reading and Writing (Columbia, Mo.: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002),
200; and Cook, Word-Play, 297. Longenbach, unusually, sees “The Plain Sense of
Things” as reassuring—a poem in which “everything becomes precious when we have
developed for it a fresh name”—but “The River of Rivers” as bleak: “it even makes
the afterworld seem . . . friendlier . . . than earth” (305).
22 
Though the few critics who discuss “The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda” con-
nect it rightly to Stevens’s youth in Reading, where a pagoda awaited young lovers
“alone on a mountain,” the poem’s presence in the same group of poems as “Nuns
Painting Water Lilies” suggests a link to the gazebo in the park in Hartford (CPP,
456). On “The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda” and “an actual pagoda,” see also
Cook, Word-Play, 299.
23 
Cook, Reader’s Guide, 282. See Cornelio, Elizabeth Park, 87.
24 
By the postwar era asphalt paving covered Hartford’s major roads, with macadam
only on park paths and side streets. The matter of which streets to repave, and when,
seems to have been especially salient in West Hartford, which controlled part of
Elizabeth Park. See Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, 207–09.
25 
Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire, 59.

348 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

 26 
See Greg Williamson, “Double Exposures,” in his Errors in the Script (Sewanee,
TN: Sewanee/Overlook, 2001), 33–58.
27 
Park planners in Hartford argued over how much, and how, to segregate separate
parks for separate uses; Elizabeth Park made room both for children’s games and for
adults who wished to contemplate natural beauty—planners unsurprisingly saw it as a
success. See Baldwin, Domesticating the Street, 116–46. Stevens could not have known
Jane Jacobs’s influential argument that urban spaces, including parks, flourish only
through a diversity of uses, though Jacobs’s admirers might find in “The Hermitage”
and “Nuns Painting Water Lilies” some evidence for it. See Jacobs, The Death and
Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 89–111, 152–77.
28 
“The Plain Sense of Things” and “The Hermitage at the Center” appeared in the
Nation in December 1952, “Vacancy” in Hudson Review in August, “Nuns” in the
journal Wake in 1950 (see Cook, Reader’s Guide, 280, 284, 301).
29 
Brazeau identifies the “rustic arbor” in “Vacancy in the Park” with the real ga-
zebo in Elizabeth Park. See Brazeau, 232; see also Lensing, Wallace Stevens and the
Seasons, 154.
30 
A letter of 1952 to Sister Bernetta Quinn seems to anticipate the poem: “This
morning I walked around in the park here for almost an hour before coming to the
office and felt as blank as one of the ponds which in the weather at this time of year
are motionless. But perhaps it was the blankness that made me enjoy it so much” (L,
762).
31 
See Cook, Reader’s Guide, 294. For pictures of the restored church, which now
serves Hartford’s Latino worshippers, see The Church of the Good Shepherd—Hartford,
http://www.cgshartford.org/id8.html.
32 
A bus conductor in Ireland, Stevens wrote to Thomas McGreevy in 1948, must
“know everyone on the run just as conductors do here” (L, 611). See also Letters,
643.
33 
Stevens himself took an evening paper, the now-defunct (and hard-to-obtain)
Hartford Times, not the morning paper of “On the Way to the Bus,” though he would
have 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 of the reverberation / Of
a windy night as it is, when the marble statues / Are like newspapers blown by the
wind” (CPP, 404). See Vendler, On Extended Wings, 277.
35 
For Lensing, “On the Way to the Bus” finds pleasure in imagining “a world
liberated from the . . . excrescences of the intrusive self” (Wallace Stevens and the
Seasons, 170).
36 
Bloom, 365; Thomas Hines, The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell Univ. Press, 1976), 258. On “The River of Rivers” and actual rivers, see also
P. D. Henry, “In the Connecticut Grain,” Kenyon Review, n.s., 7 (1985), 88–89; and
Cook, Reader’s Guide, 296.
37 
The Official State of Connecticut Website, “About 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 of [this] poem is more admirable even than its for-
titude”: the river’s lack of consistent direction becomes another measure of that ease
(Words Chosen Out of Desire, 77). “I like to think of all the small ports and harbors,”
Stevens mused in “Connecticut Composed,” and “also the towns up and down the
Connecticut River” (CPP, 896). On the poem in general, see also Fisher, 147–54;
Doreski, 156–58; and Steven Shaviro, “‘That Which Is Always Beginning’: Stevens’s
Late Poetry of Affirmation,” PMLA 100 (1985): 220–33.

Stephen Burt 349

 39 
Fisher, 149. The “flecked river / Which kept flowing and never the same way twice”
in another late poem, “This Solitude of Cataracts,” reflects “thought-like Monadnocks,”
(CPP, 366) though Lombardi, obedient to his thesis, groups it with the poems of
Schuylkill and Swatara: see Lombardi, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone,
191. The tidal quality of the river may be relevant, too, to “Of Hartford in a Purple
Light”: in that earlier poem of apostrophe and description, the sun, arriving at last
on his “trip / From Havre to Hartford” and bringing “the ocean with” him, discovers
“the spray / Of the ocean” at twilight, which is to say the presence of the feminine and
of the aesthetic, even in that businesslike, Northern, masculine place (CPP, 208). On
Hartford and “Of Hartford in a Purple Light,” see also Doreski, 154–56.
40 
Marguerite Allis, Connecticut River (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1939), 184. This
ferry and another at the shoreline were the only two in operation as of 1939; both still
operate today. See T. R. Lewis and J. E. Hammon, Connecticut: A Geography (Boulder:
Westview, 1986), 121; and The Connecticut Department of Transportation, “Rocky
Hill-Glastonbury Ferry,” 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.
42 
On Stevens’s foreign correspondents, see Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1986), 227–41. A more recent treatment
is Filreis, 160–206.
43 
Wallace Stevens to Renato Poggioli, 10 July 1953, Houghton Library, Harvard
University, cited in Poggioli, 185; see also Sukenick, 196.
44 
Doreski gets this stanza backwards; for him, the “trees / That lack the intelligence
of trees” are trees that grow by the river of rivers, rather than trees that grow instead
by the “black cataracts,” on the unseen Stygian shores. See Doreski, 156–57.
45 
Stevens told Louis Martz that he had “fixed on this idea of a poem about a walk in
New Haven, but then branching out,” making the site “so generalized that it isn’t any
longer a local place” (quoted in Gilbert, 77). Both Cook and Gilbert argue that it is
local: for the former, Stevens’s “close contact with the city of New Haven” means that
the “movements of the meditation can be mapped” (Cook, Word-Play, 267, 268). For
the latter, “the poet’s experience of New Haven . . . is an almost constant presence”;
“the city becomes a testing ground for his speculations” (Gilbert, Walks in the World,
77). For other readings of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” see note 8, above.
46 
Vendler, On Extended Wings, 305.
47 
Because New Haven is gray, unglamorous, and not where the poet lives, Roger
Gilbert explains, “walking in New Haven on a windy evening in late autumn ensures
that one’s love of the real is genuine” (Gilbert, Walks in the World, 102). For Vendler,
Stevens’s linguistic focus on “the ordinary and the unenchanted,” even on “the total
colorlessness of the absolute,” attempt to “account, in terms of consciousness, for a
depression which is overwhelmingly physical,” the “metabolic depletion of age” (Ven-
dler, On Extended Wings, 271, 287).
48 
The only recent discussion of “Connecticut Composed” appears to be Filreis’s
look at the Cold War context for the radio series: see Filreis, 247–50. For an earlier
discussion, see Baird, 240–41.
49 
“Oxidia” is the industrial conurbation of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “the
seed / Dropped out of this amber-ember pod” that Stevens’s “evolved” man makes
into his paradoxical Olympia (CPP, 149).
50 
See Vendler, Words Chosen Out of Desire; and Lensing, Wallace Stevens and the
Seasons. For family and rootedness in Pennsylvania, see Lombardi and Quinn, note
6 above.

350 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived

 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 discovery.
55 
Charles Berger, Forms of Farewell (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985),
177.
56 
Tim Armstrong, “Winter Aesthetics: The Closed Field in American Modernist
Poetry,” Modern American Landscapes, ed. Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles
(Amsterdam: VU Univ. Press, 1995), 136–37.
57 
Longenbach, 296.
58 
J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge:
Cambridge 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: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 297–98.
62 
Cook identifies a line of “Spaniards” from Harmonium to the last poems: see
Cook, Word-Play, 304–06.
63 
A good summary of politically-minded critics’ interest in “Description Without
Place” is Margaret Dickie, “Teaching the New Stevens,” in Teaching Wallace Stevens,
ed. John Serio and B. J. Leggett (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1994), 288–90.
One detailed political reading of the poem is Filreis, Wallace Stevens and the Actual
World, 151–60, 181–85. Brogan admires, implausibly, its “ethical vision for America”
(86). Vendler finds the poem unsatisfying for other reasons: see On Extended Wings,
217–30.
64 
Wesley Kort, Place and Space in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: Univ. of Florida
Press, 2004), 205.
65 
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 5, 8.
66 
Lynch, 54.
67 
Edward Casey, Getting Back Into Place (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993),
121–22. Such analogies obviously provide material for psychoanalytic readings: see,
especially, D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Penguin, 1971); and
Transitional Objects and Potential Spaces: Literary Uses of D. W. Winnicott, ed. Peter
Rudnytsky (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993).
68 
Casey himself makes repeated reference to Stevens, finding in “Anecdote of the
Jar” and “A Mythology Reflects Its Region” a less troubled dwelling in New England
than I do. See Casey, Getting Back Into Place, 236–39.
69 
Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 2001), 8, 7.
70 
Buell, 243. To think of “The River of Rivers” as watershed literature might also
address the quondam puzzle about the presence of Farmington in that poem, since,
though the town of that name lies a few miles away from the Connecticut River,
the Farmington River drains into it. For the Berkshires, New Hampshire (Mount
Monadnock and riverine “cataracts”) and Vermont, see Collected Poems and Prose,
366, 476; on “This Solitude of Cataracts,” see also Cook, Word-Play, 307–09, and
Sukenick, 164–65.
71 
Buell, 254.
72 
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,
2002), 44, 169.

Stephen Burt 351

 73 
Eeckhout, 126. An entire book, by the poet Mark Halliday, indicts the “abstraction
and lack of vivid particularity” that Halliday finds in Stevens’s work (Stevens and the
Interpersonal [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991], 119).
74 
Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama
Press, 2002), 12, 51.
75 
The “conception of the skin as a house . . . in which the subject lies hidden . . . is
diametrically opposed to the perception of skin as a felt boundary that can be expe-
rienced” figuratively or sensorily through, for example, “characterization of people or
places as cold or warm” (Claudia Benthien, Skin, trans. Thomas Dunlap [New York:
Columbia Univ. Press, 2002], 36).
76 
Gins and Arakawa, 69.
77 
John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge: 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’s
letter to James Powers of 21 December 1953, in which his delight at a sermon on the
radio—not so much for its religious content, but for its sense that Christmas has some
meaning for someone—makes him “clap my hands . . . and say Bravo! Bravo! Perhaps
that only goes to show how queer you become if you remain in New England long
enough” (L, 805). For other readings of “A Discovery of Thought,” see Vendler, On
Extended Wings, 312–14; Berger, 153–57; and Bloom, 351–54. “Knowing everything,
this infant creature is everything” (Vendler, On Extended Wings, 313); “Like Christ he
will be a human epitome” (Lensing, Wallace Stevens and the Seasons, 159).

352 Wallace Stevens: Where He Lived