Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Abstract

Spring in is just as wild as spring in Persia, Wallace Stevens once wrote in a fit of exuberance (Letters 679). Though disappointed that spring of 1950 wasn't as bright as he had hoped, he still felt moved to invoke his love of exotic on behalf of his adopted state. Milton Bates, however, in considering role of landscape in Stevens's poetry, argues that despite affection revealed in late radio script Composed Stevens Deep down . . . belonged to wood and stone of Pennsylvania rather than Connecticut (288). While Stevens's lingering affection for Pennsylvania of his childhood is undeniable, Bates here confounds a somewhat sentimental love of actual scenery with reinvention of landscape and renewal of self in larger terms of Stevens's aesthetic. Poets of place, with whom Stevens accurately identified himself, tend to bond quickly and deeply to their immediate locales because contemplating mind engenders poem by reshaping, with gusto, particular qualities of available land forms. is an unspectacular landscape. In Composed Stevens, describing a train ride across state, finds landscape to be minimalist, punctuated most prominently by acts of culture, not of nature: Everything seemed gray, bleached and derelict and word derelict kept repeating itself as part of activity of train. But this was a precious ride through character of state. The soil everywhere seemed thin and difficult and every cutting and open pit disclosed gravel and rocks, in which only young pine trees seemed to do well. There were chicken farms, some of them abandoned, and there were cow-barns. The great barns of other states do not exist. There were orchards of apples and peaches. Yet in this sparse landscape with its old houses of gray and white there were other houses, smaller, fresher, more fastidimous. (Opus 303) The fastidious little houses thrive in this unadorned landscape much as Stevens's imagination does. Plain, unsentimental, provincial, or colorless landscapes suffice for myth-making poet as well as, perhaps better than, settings idealized by history, ancestral piety, or unusual physical beauty. I This is one reason why Stevens's poems of attain a mythic aura more powerful than that of Robert Lowell's early poems about Boston, for example, and resistant to totalizing aesthetic of realism found in William Carlos Williams's poetry of industrial New Jersey and Hart Crane's urbanized epic meditations on myth of American cultural hegemony. Geographical tropes, for romantic-modernist poets, tend to fuse immediate with elusive or ineffable. The Hartford that Robert Lowell described, in reference to Stevens, as Boston, only worse, and more parochialized, by insurance companies themselves (Lowell 209), was not Hartford of imagination. The latter, like New Haven and River of Rivers in Connecticut, is a fusion, under pressure, to make what Stevens refers to in Someone Puts a Pineapple Together as the total artifice [that] reveals itself / As total (Necessary 57). Stevens's philosophical bent often leads him to imitate a metaphysical argument that has usually been taken to be subject, and, until Helen Vendler in Words Chosen Out of Desire clearly defined passion of his language, seemed to preclude emotion as a central issue in his most important work. However, placement of meditative self in landscape constitutes not only mis en scene of poems, especially after Harmonium, but basic situation of metaphor, stance in which imagination and reality most fully engage each other. The trope of geography is not one of description but of action. …