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Wallace Stevens in Connecticut
Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by William Doreski
"Spring in Connecticut is just as wild as spring in Persia," Wallace Stevens once wrote in a fit of exuberance (Letters 679). Though disappointed that the spring of 1950 wasn't as bright as he had hoped, he still felt moved to invoke his love of the exotic on behalf of his adopted state. Milton Bates, however, in considering the role of the Connecticut landscape in Stevens's poetry, argues that despite the affection revealed in the late radio script "Connecticut Composed" Stevens "Deep down . . . belonged to the wood and stone of Pennsylvania rather than Connecticut" (288). While Stevens's lingering affection for the Pennsylvania of his childhood is undeniable, Bates here confounds a somewhat sentimental love of actual scenery with the reinvention of landscape and renewal of self in the 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 the contemplating mind engenders the poem by reshaping, with gusto, the particular qualities of available land forms.
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Connecticut is an unspectacular landscape. In "Connecticut Composed" Stevens, describing a train ride across the state, finds the landscape to be minimalist, punctuated most prominently by the acts of culture, not of nature:
Everything seemed gray, bleached and derelict and the word
derelict kept repeating itself as part of the activity of the train. But
this was a precious ride through the character of the state. The
soil everywhere seemed thin and difficult and every cutting and
open pit disclosed gravel and rocks, in which only the 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 the 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 Connecticut attain a mythic aura more powerful than that of Robert Lowell's early poems about Boston, for example, and resistant to the totalizing aesthetic of realism found in William Carlos Williams's poetry of industrial New Jersey and Hart Crane's urbanized epic meditations on the myth of American cultural hegemony.
Geographical tropes, for romantic-modernist poets, tend to fuse the immediate with the elusive or the ineffable. The Hartford that Robert Lowell described, in reference to Stevens, as "like Boston, only worse, and more parochialized, by the insurance companies themselves" (Lowell 209), was not the Hartford of the imagination. The latter, like New Haven and the "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 the total reality" (Necessary 57).
Stevens's philosophical bent often leads him to imitate a metaphysical argument that has usually been taken to be the subject, and, until Helen Vendler in Words Chosen Out of Desire clearly defined the passion of his language, seemed to preclude emotion as a central issue in his most important work. However, the placement of the meditative self in the landscape constitutes not only the mis en scene of the poems, especially after Harmonium, but the basic situation of metaphor, the stance in which the imagination and reality most fully engage each other.
The trope of geography is not one of description but of action. The specific nature of a setting determines, to a great extent, the action possible within it, the undulation of the resultant meditation. For this purpose, Connecticut served as well as Pennsylvania, or perhaps better, since Stevens seems to find it a malleable backdrop, a place that resists too great a pressure of reality (as New York City might), yet exerts a sufficient degree of the commonplace. In certain key poems, especially in the last two collections, Stevens's adopted state became central to the conception and execution because of the particular nature of the landscape and the lack (for him) of immediate pressing historical, social, and cultural implications.
It is safe to say that these poems would have been at least slightly different if Stevens's central meditative voice had found itself in another setting. "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," and "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" derive certain of their qualities from the particularity, different in each instance, with which Stevens embraces the Connecticut setting. He does not resort to description in the manner of Wordsworth or even of Williams, upon one of whose themes he once wrote "nuances." Connecticut, in each of these poems, is not a site of picturesque scenery or finely distinguished details but a "region full of intonings," a place without description but full of mysterious light, a place in which desire, imagination, and the world come together in ways that in the later stages of Stevens's career seem increasingly certain yet immensely complex, generating scenes of innumerable shadings.
