My sister is a poet, among other things, and she sent me this story about a famous poet and his association with the not-always-poetic city of Hartford, where he worked for insurance industry. (Which just goes to show that poetry blossoms where it will.)
Jeff Gordinier writes in the NY Times about taking a Wallace Stevens walking tour that was, “like Hartford itself, quite modest. … Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevens’s most indelible poems, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ That’s about it.
“Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving,” writes Gordinier, “After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?
“Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself …
“ ‘It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,’ Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvard’s grande dame of poetry and the author of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, explained to me in an e-mail. ‘As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.’ …
“Evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford — his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.
“ ‘Stevens enjoyed his work very much,’ said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. ‘It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.’ …
“What moved me about the walk, in the end, was that he had chosen to walk at all. In a car-mad country that prides itself in being perpetually in motion, the poet made a clear and conscious decision to stop, to slow down, to burrow into his imagination. And walking had opened his eyes and ears to a place that was full of surprises. As Stevens himself put it in a poem:
“ ‘It is like a region full of intonings./It is Hartford seen in a purple light.’ ” Read more.
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