Wallace Stevens in Connecticut

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.

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.

"Of Hartford in a Purple Light" vaguely hints at a response to Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," and illustrates the great compression often found in Steven's shorter poems of the 1930s.2 It is a poem about learning to see landscape, and about seeing as an act of creation that occurs in the light of the revealed world. The speaker, who humbles himself by addressing the sun as "Master" (always an ironic title in Stevens's work), assumes the role of the poet who interprets the light in terms of his own perceptions, which mingle quotidian actuality (town, river, railroad) with operatic coloration and the frank artifice of personification:

A long time you have been making the trip

From Havre to Hartford, Master Soleil,

Bringing the lights of Norway and all that.

A long time the ocean has come with you,

Shaking the water off, like a poodle,

That splatters incessant thousands of drops,

Each drop a petty tricolor. For this,

The aunts in Pasadena, remembering,

Abhor the plaster of the western horses,

Souvenirs of museums. But, Master, there are

Lights masculine and lights feminine.

What is this purple, this parasol,

This stage-light of the Opera?

It is like a region full of intonings.

It is Hartford seen in a purple light.

A moment ago, light masculine,

Working, with big hands, on the town,

Arranged its heroic attitudes.

But now as an amour of women

Purple sets purple round. Look, Master,

See the river, the railroad, the cathedral ...

When male light fell on the naked back

Of the town, the river, the railroad were clear.

Now, every muscle slops away.

Hi! Whisk it, poodle, flick the spray

Of the ocean, ever-freshening,

On the irised hunks, the stone bouquet. (Collected 226-27) Understanding this poem requires accepting the preposterous manner with which it imitates a Dickensian servant's slyly humble address to his master. This address concludes with an imitation of the voice in which one might "Hi!" away an even lowlier servant to do the master's bidding, in this instance the poet "Hi"-ing away the ocean. The difficulty of taking seriously this kind of rhetorical play may be why this poem has rarely been discussed by Stevens critics. But almost alone among Stevens's poems of this period it manifests an aspect of the poet's relationship with reality that will become more apparent in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction."

The poet, Stevens emphasizes, is the servant of reality. The earlier romantics elevated imagination to a noble and central role in poetics; but for Stevens it is the means by which the poet maintains composure in the face of the bright light, the enormous pressure, of the real. The imagination functions as a sense of humor might function to keep a servant from despair. By mediating between reality and desire, the imagination makes poetry possible, but it also prevents the light of the sun from simplifying or occluding reality. The servant, not the master, understands the dichotomy of "Lights masculine and lights feminine," and understands that the purple that envelops Hartford is the light of the sun translated (as through a prism) by his imagination to represent his desire for the feminine, while the "heroic attitudes" embody his vision of the masculine. The relationship between masculine power and feminine complexities of coloration are problematic, but probably not as insistently Freudian as some critics have claimed.3 The masculine-feminine dichotomy is a produce of culture, not of nature, and is a fiction, unlike the sun. Could his imagination have illuminated New York in similar shades of purple? Perhaps only a "town," not a city, readily accepts being arranged into "heroic attitudes." It is not difficult to believe that the pressure of reality exerted by New York, because already shaped into attitudes larger than the merely heroic, would resist such embellishmet. Hartford, in this instance, is a suitable site of contention between the will of the sun, which resists the differentiations of culture, and the desire of the poet, which imaginatively distinguishes things, colors, and forms of rhetoric. That he also seems to fear the feminine as a diminution of the masculine underscores the courage necessary to acknowledge this distinction, which the harsh light of the sun would otherwise obliterate. Generating the supreme fiction requires that desire and reality negotiate on roughly equal terms.

The title of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," as Ronald Sukenick aptly notes, indicates that its subject "flows through Connecticut, as well as everywhere else" (196). Yet it is a river that if mythic in one dimension is decidedly geographical in another, and occupies space as well as mind, though in a locale that is not entirely natural, with "trees that lack the intelligence of trees" (Collected 533). The trees, as Stevens suggested in a commentary, grow in an unnatural place, and therefore lack that bond with nature that allows them to share in its vast, somewhat undifferentiated, intelligence.(4) That is because here above the first black cataracts nature is beginning to yield to culture, and reality and the imagination begin to interact. The tone of the poem is that of the geography lesson, which suggests we accept a certain yielding to the pressure of reality; but the necessity of reminding the reader that this river is not the Styx (but rather is a river on the near side, reality's side, of Stygia) suggests how porous is the membrane between the mythic and the real, and how inexact is Stevens's aphorism that "Reality is a cliche / From which we escape by metaphor" (Opus 204).

Sukenick argues that the metaphorically vital river represents the flow of "existence," and that it "consists of the tangible reality of common objects, such as |The Steeple at Farmington,' and the town of Haddam" (196). However, in my readings of the poem the river does not represent existence (or, as Vendler puts it, "the total stream of life" [Words 74]) but rather is the force in landscape that mediates between geographical actuality and the desire for landscapes of the imagination. Metaphor is no longer about the relationship between tenor and vehicle, that neat but obfuscating binary complement. Another late poem dismisses that binary relationship by defining metaphor "Not [as] Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself," a "scrawny cry from outside" (Collected 534) that invites the imagination to claim it as its own.

The action of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" (Collected 533) is nothing less than the rediscovery of much of Connecticut (a state both of desire and of reality) through the process of mediating between landscape and desire. Mock pedantry gives way to an argument about the way landscape and the imagination interact, which then concludes with a marriage of elements--light and air--and a moment of transcendence. Faced with particulars--the steeple at Farmington (which incidentally is not on the Connecticut River, but on a tributary) and the village of Haddam--the imagination interacts with the river, the emblem of vital natural and cultural (mythic) force, and of these two vitalities engenders a "third commonness with light and air, / A curriculum," a plan, a program, "a vigor, a local abstraction...." The State of Connecticut, a political and cultural abstraction represented by two actual place names, is regenerated by the river that flows everywhere and nowhere, that never exhausts itself but does change its shape.

I do not agree with Harold Bloom that this poem "accepts the myth of Stygia, region of the river Styx, in order to transcend the role of Charon and the oblivion of Hades" (365). Rather, the poem reminds us of the myth only to refute it and assert that "There is no ferryman" and "No shadows walk on its banks"; the myth is unoccupied, therefore defunct, and the river-as-process is not bound to the past. Bloom aptly describes the river as a "trope of power," but it is particularly a figure of the combined power of geographical actuality and the imagination. The myth of Stygia was the product of that combination once, long ago, but the new myth is Connecticut, that "local abstraction" generated by light and air.

If, as Bloom contends, this Connecticut is a "transcendence," what is transcended are the relative limitations of geography and the imagination. The geography lesson concludes, then, with the irony that the curriculum linking reality and the imagination transforms the river into a sea--a wry comment, perhaps, on the "oceanic feeling" that Bloom quotes from Freud. Wry because this transformation negates the original metaphoric value of the river and redirects its power--or rather negates its power by forcing it to relinquish its form. Perhaps this is why myths like that of Stygia grow stale--it is the making of myth, the curriculum, the confrontation of imagination with the glistening of the steeple, the shining of the village, that engenders the naming that in turn stalls the river, broadens it into sea-like stasis. Transcendence balances reality and the imagination to generate an entity that is neither, but that abstract state is momentary, at best, and its price is the depletion of the vitality of its originating metaphor.

Connecticut, then, attains the status of myth, as Stygia long ago did, but this new visionary quality is a product of light and air, and is not a permanent state. As Stevens says in "Connecticut Composed," "We live in the tradition which is the true mythology of the region and we breathe in with every breath the joy of having ourselves been created by what has been endured and mastered in the past" (Opus 303). Myth, which is constantly being re-created by the pressure of desire, represents the past and links it to the present, but it is a living process, begat by and begetting living beings. Because it is culture, not nature, myth cannot sustain trees, and because the fatefulness of the river is that it flows from myth (culture) to reality (nature) and back again, trees cannot thrive on its banks. But the river's "propelling force" is the pressure of reality, not of myth, and only that moment of closure, when the pressure of poetry and the imagination is greatest (a recurring structural principle in Stevens's late lyrics), can stall it "like a sea."

The New Haven of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (Collected 465-89) is twofold: it is "The eye's plain version . . . the vulgate of experience" (1), the reality of a shabby industrial city between Hartford and New York; it is place where we might "Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, / So that they become an impalpable town" (11), a place (or state) of imaginative redemption. The bulk of the poem mediates between these two New Havens. Because it is an ordinary evening, this mediation, we may assume, is part of ordinary experience; in fact, as the poem progresses, it seems to be the necessary state of existence. Vendler argues that the poem is concerned with aging and depletion, and that the poem sets itself the difficult task of "accounting, in terms of consciousness, for a depression which is overwhelmingly physical--the metabolic depletion in age of the body's responses" (271). Because the scenery itself is so depleted, because "These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate / Appearances of what appearances" (1), they link themselves metaphorically to the poet, who is a house composed of the sun and yet a house like these other houses, collapsing under the pressure of reality.

The flux of metaphor, then, mingles the dominant tropes--those of the dark, the body as dilapidated house, and light, the house made of sun. New Haven, though a "physical town," boasts "metaphysical houses." But neither the physical nor the metaphysical vision alone suffices to account for the depletion, the "barrenness" that "is an exposing ... / a coming on and a coming forth." Depletion, a human entropy, would hardly return as "a clearness" that "stands restored" (XXX). Imagination is a state of grace, not a fixed dimension, but it is the expression of the human half of the world, a place of elemental desire. We keep "coming back to the real" because its clarity corrects the blinding sunlit narcissism of desire, but reality does not monopolize the world - it is not simply a matter of the mind versus the planet. While the poem does not quite commit itself, it raises the possibility that "reality exists / in the mind" (XXVIII), and that "Real and unreal are two in one." Yet even if reality exists in the mind it does not wholly constitute it, nor does the mind entirely constitute the world. The poem notes that "The sun is half the world" (XXIII), and "New Haven is half sun," though the other half, the dark half, is slightly more real because "lighted by space" rather than by the sun, which is complicit with the imagination. The mind describes, even inscribes a place (as on a postcard), but does not embody it.

As the poem progresses, the imagery of light and dark, dilapidation and sun, finds embodiments distant from physical New Haven, as the "land of the lemon trees" (sun imagery), for example, or the "squirrels, in tree-caves" that "Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels" (i.e. who brood in dark dilapidated houses) (XXX). Eventually the poem (in section XXXI) concludes by arguing that subtleties of perception and art approach the final form of reality by reconceiving and revising it, finding form without fixation, perhaps as a tone or coloring. The resolution to the state of depression, languor, and self-depletion is to demonstrate that the two New Havens complement and inhere in each other--to deconstruct the metaphor of the self as a dilapidated house, deconstruct as well the self as house composed of sun, and demonstrate how these are in fact the same house. The labyrinthine argument is too extended and complex to summarize here, but for purposes of this essay it is useful to consider the forms in which the qualities of New Haven and its setting (especially its night sky), both the New Haven of dilapidated houses and the one that like the poet's imagination is made of sun, recur.

Sections I and Il present the two New Havens and summarize the difficulties of telling them apart:

Obscure, in colors whether of the sun

Or mind, uncertain in the clearest bells,

The spirit's speeches, the indefinite,

Confused illuminations and sonorities,

So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart

The idea and the bearer-being of the idea. New Haven is half light, half dark, both idea and the bearer of the idea. As such, it would seem to be the perfect embodiment of the balance between reality and imagination that ignites the moment of transcendence in "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," but it is also a city of particular qualities that in some ways obfuscate, in some ways promote the desire that leads to effective confrontation with the real. Section IV argues, roughly, that people living in places like New Haven have trouble shaping their desire, although the very voice of desire is satisfying because it calls attention to otherness:

Plain men in plain towns

Are not precise about the appeasement they need.

They only know a savage assuagement cries

With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear

Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,

A matching and mating of surprised accords,

A responding to a diviner opposite. For Stevens "savage" means closer to the idea (not the fact) of origin, and it is apt that a savage voice should transpose, mute, and comfort, and give rise to a "savage and subtle and simple harmony," the very sort of harmony he seeks to generate in these late poems. Certainly the anaphora points to Stevens's central lifelong concern with finding a language adequate for expressing that which precedes and follows language: the recurrent idea of origin, the depletion of the imagination under the pressure of reality.

The people of New Haven, "plain men" in a plain town, confront the world without (for example, the projection of tropical luxuriance, which has to be imagined later in the poem), but they do have architecture and culture, Yale and everything it represents. Section VII offers the city's cultural institutions as sources of interpretation of the "Naked Alpha" with which the experience of reality begins, as well as the "hierophant Omega" (in VI), where it concludes:

In the presence of such chapels and such schools,

The impoverished architects appear to be

Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive. But these cultural monuments are not the only forms after which we model our experience. In fact, they and other external manifestations of form reinforce a rather commonplace notion of reality:

The objects tingle and the spectator moves

With the objects. But the spectator also moves

With lesser things, with things exteriorized

Out of rigid realists. It is as if

Men turning into things, as comedy,

Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display

The truth about themselves, having lost, as things,

That power to conceal they had as men,

Not merely as to depth but as to height

As well, not merely as to the commonplace

But, also, as to their miraculous,

Conceptions of new mornings of new worlds. New Haven tempts us to "fling ourselves, constantly longing, on this form" (VIII), on commonplace reality. The streets breathe it, and we breathe the breath of the streets, so "We keep coming back and coming back / To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns / That fall upon it out of the wind." Tempted by powerfully concrete manifestations, "We seek / the poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation" (IX) and attempt to link word and object in a simple but impossible bond. But like seekers of real toads in imaginary gardens we can enter the metaphysical streets of physical New Haven, and through the imagination see real things more fully, more as themselves. "Juda becomes New Haven, or else must" (XI) because the "profoundest forms" are the product of metaphysical seeing. Only a town that could remind one of Juda and yet still be made of the most commonplace reality could satisfy Professor Eucalyptus, who looks for god in a shabby room in New Haven, whose pantheism suggests the aesthetic that rejects trope and would embrace the word as if embracing the thing itself:

The dry eucalyptus seeks god in the rainy cloud.

Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks him

In New Haven with an eye that does not look

Beyond the object. He sits in his room, beside

The window, close to the ramshackle spout in which

The rain falls with a ramshackle sound. He seeks

God in the object itself, without much choice.

It is a choice of the commodious adjective

For what he sees, it comes in the end to that.

(XIV)

Clearly New Haven lends itself to this sort of seeking because it is so utterly, temptingly commonplace, a "dilapidation of dilapidations" (XVI). This is precisely the city Stevens requires for his musing on self-dilapidation and the temptation to allow the imagination to wither under the pressure of reality. Its very ordinariness tempts the ephebe to envision something beyond it. just as the free verse of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" slyly suggests blank verse to the eye and ear but refuses its formal confinement, so the city itself suggests larger ideas of form, larger ideas of reality than it actually embodies. The pressure of reality is not as great here as it first appears, just as the poem's verse is not so restrictive as it appears. If one brings "a strong mind" to "a weak neighborhood" (XIII) one is able to define "a fresh spiritual" and distinguish "The actual landscape with its actual horns" and get "at an essential integrity."

Because "Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven / Before and after one arrives" (XXVIII), because places are utterly implicated by our perceptions of them, it is difficult to sort out their reality from our continual processing of that reality, "This endlessly elaborating poem" that "Displays the theory of poetry, / As the life of poetry." Theory and life are not quite the same (though in an aphorism in "Adagia" Stevens asserts that "The theory of poetry is the theory of life" [Opus 202]), and yet a "More harassing master" can demonstrate that they are the same, that the process of linking the imagination and reality through the mind generates tropical worlds of luxuriance in which the theory of poetry is the theory of life. New Haven, however, is itself a severe master, and the poem keeps returning to it, edging and inching toward "final form" (XXXI), which will be a version of New Haven in which form is not a fixation but a tone or coloring, "a force that traverses a shade."

If the actual New Haven hadn't existed, some other shabby industrial town with a college would have done as well, perhaps. But New Haven is paradigmatic. It manifests the most commonplace reality and yet contains numerous distinguished versions of Professor Eucalyptus musing upon the ineffable. Stevens knew the city mostly from passing through it on the train from Hartford to New York. Because the train always stopped for a fairly lengthy period to change engines (from steam to electric) before the trip under Park Avenue to Grand Central, and again on the way back, Stevens must often have sat staring out at the dirty brown-brick station, the big plain hotel on the west side of the green, the Harkness Tower a few blocks beyond.

In progressing from a commonplace, brick-textured foreground to the hotel of reality to the reaching for the ineffable represented by Yale's neo-Gothic architecture, this view embodies the movement the poem works out, more or less, in its complex meditative drama. The perspective of the poem, then, derives from an actual situation, and imitates in its rhetoric the contemplating mind that is merely passing through on the way somewhere else, for which New Haven is "a sense in the changing sense / Of things" (XIX). Before reaching New Haven, a sense of its reality forms in the imagination. There, for a brief period, the sheer mundaneness of the scene overwhelms the imagination. Then, after the train has moved on toward New York or Hartford, the New Haven of the imagination returns in revitalized form. A lifetime's worth of trips to New York generated the complexities of this meditation, train trips Stevens described in terms conducive to self-renewal: "I went to New York last week.... Only to sit in the train and look out of the window gets one over these occasional periods of restlessness" (Letters 692).

For Wallace Stevens, then, Connecticut consisted of light and dark, a state of the real and a state of the imagination. No distinction between these is other than momentary, fluid, "imaginary poles," oppositions that last only as long as the perception of them. Transcendence, which renders the landscape and the mind as a single entity, and which maps metaphysical streets over real ones, is a difficult state to engender, impossible to maintain for long. Stevens, though a poet of place, does not commit himself to living in the hotel of reality; but when he requires the particulars of a place to manifest themselves he finds that the "gray bleached derelict" qualities of his adopted state are sometimes those that best serve him. More significantly, Stevens seems to find an aesthetic parallel in the Connecticut landscape to the plainness of voice that in the period of "The Rock" suits him better than the gaudier rhetoric of Harmonium or even "Of Hartford in a Purple Light." The plainest landscapes, human or natural, display the subtlest gradations of tone and coloring.

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).

WORKS CITED

Bates, Milton J. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1985. Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. Longenbach, James. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, 1987. Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1954. --. Letters. New York: Knopf, 1966. --. The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage, 1965. --. Opus Posthumous. New Ed. Ed. Milton J. Bates. New York: Knopf, 1989. --. The Palm at the End of the Mind. Ed. Holly Stevens. Hamden: Archon, 1984. Sukenick, Ronald. Wallace Stevens: Musing the Obscure. New York: NYUP, 1967. Vendler, Helen. On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969. --. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1984.

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