Stevens in Connecticut (and Denmark)

Abstract

My testimony in this chapter is more American than Transatlantic. I first began to read Wallace Stevens seriously when I was a graduate student at Harvard from 1948 to 1952. I bought, and still have, the separate volumes of his poems, available one by one before the Collected Poems appeared. Though I did not read William Carlos Williams seriously until much later, when I was writing Poets of Reality, I heard both Stevens and Williams give readings at Harvard around 1950. I remember the powerful ‘Blouagh!’ Williams enunciated when he read ‘The Sea Elephant’. I remember also seeing him after the reading getting into a shabby car. This was, I supposed, the sort of car a family doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, was likely to drive. Stevens I remember as austere and distant, ‘tall and of a port in air’, like that jar in Tennessee (CPP 61). Richard Wilbur, who seemed fragile and slight beside Stevens, introduced him. Though I suppose Stevens was not really wearing high-button shoes and a celluloid collar, he might as well have been. He looked like an overweight insurance executive, which he was. I remember he read ‘Credences of Summer’ (‘Now in midsummer come and all fools slaughtered’ [CPP 322]) and ‘Large Red Man Reading’ (‘he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae, / The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: / Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines’ [CPP 365]).