Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

Because Stevens argues that "a mythology reflects its region," it is safe to assume that the myth-making of his late poetry that grows out of his confrontation with real and imagined Connecticut assumes a form peculiar to that relationship. The penultimate poem of The Palm at the End of the Mind argues that the creator of the myth is himself created by the landscapes, actual or imagined, in which he renews himself, as Stevens renews himself in dilapidated New Haven, and becomes the landscape as the landscape becomes an extension of him:

"A MYTHOLOGY REFLECTS ITS REGION"

A mythology reflects its region. Here

In Connecticut, we never lived in a time

When mythology was possible--but if we had--

That raises the question of the image's truth.

The image must be of the nature of its creator.

It is the nature of its creator increased,

Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth

And it is he in the substance of his region,

Wood of his forests and stone out of his fields

Or from under his mountains. (398)

To be a creator, though not the Creator, is to live again in a "freshened youth," to be one with fields and mountains, to become the "substance of his region." Because the landscape is neither more nor less than its image, because the real is not the commonplace but a bond between desire and perception, because Connecticut is a region not only of wood and stone (surely indistinguishable from the wood and stone of Pennsylvania referred to by Bates) but of humanly formed images, it is an adequate force field in which to generate a mythology. The coy disclaimer that "We never lived in a time / When mythology was possible" readily yields to "But if we had" and to the larger argument that humanity is a myth-making species that is perpetually renewing its mythology by increasing and heightening itself and its vision of its surroundings, as Stevens heightens the commonplace Connecticut of derelict landscape into a landscape of purple light. As the elegant "Dutch Graves in Bucks County" makes clear, Stevens did not allow Connecticut to replace Pennsylvania in his affections; but his affections for places were varied and complex, and his aesthetic was large enough to make room for--and good use of--his adopted state.

NOTES

(1.) Helen Vendler describes the role of Connecticut in Stevens's emotional life by arguing that "The local objects of Connecticut acted as matrices in which, and through which, insights and integrations came, as he named and described these objects, over and over" (Words 6). I would argue that the objects bear qualities that particularize them, so that "matrices" seems an inexact term. And I would argue that the insights and integrations incorporate, not merely work through, these objects. Otherwise the poems would not be inclusive enough to generate powerfully mythic language. (2.) "Of Hartford in a Purple Light" first appeared in Poetry in 1939, and was reprinted in Parts of a World (1942). (3.) James Longenbach, for example, argues that "The phallic power of the organizing central man gives shape to the chaos of feminine repetition, and the common life itself grows hard" (226). I don't find this reading, which focuses on what Longenbach takes to be Stevens's attempt to expose "the oppression of the sexual myth," consistent with the rhetorical thrust of the poem. (4.) Quoted in Sukenick (196) from Renato Poggioli, Mattino Domenicale ed Altre Poesie (Tornio, 1954).