Editor's Column: Connecting Stevens to Connecticut

I like natives: people in civilized countries whose only civilization is that of their own land. Not that I have ever met any: it is merely an idea. Yet it would be nice to meet an idea like that driving a donkey cart, stopping to talk about the rain.

—Wallace Stevens, letter to Barbara Church, Sept. 7, 1948

My theory involves the entire abandonment of the notion that simple location is the primary way in which things are involved in space-time. In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times, for every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.

—Alfred North Whitehead, quoted in Wallace Stevens' "A Collect of Philosophy"

When Wallace Stevens, only months before his death in the summer of 1955, was asked to paint a verbal picture of Connecticut for a Voice of America radio series called "This Is America," he appears to have relished the definitional exercise. He launched his contribution in conspicuously affirmative terms:

The thrift and frugality of the Connecticut Yankee were necessary to life in the Colony and still are. They were imposed on him by the character of the natural world in which he had come to live, which has not changed. It required thrift and frugality to live in Connecticut and still does. And now after three centuries or more of this tradition, the people of the state are proud of it. They are proud of the kind of strength of character which they have derived from this necessity, proud of the intelligent ingenuity with which they faced their many hardships and with which they rose to the high general level of intelligence and dignified style of living that is now so characteristic of them.

(CPP 894)

After this classic example of patriotic oratory, deftly chained through rhetorical repetition, Stevens characteristically slid into the more idiosyncratic and personal reflections of a poet, who, on a recent trip to Boston, noted how "the word derelict kept repeating itself as part of the activity of the train" (CPP 894). Just as typically, he seized the opportunity of the train ride to move into a depiction of the observed landscape:

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 fastidious.

(CPP 894-95)

This brief picture-book of snapshots—banal sights nonetheless recorded with an artist's precise eye—then issued in a personal love declaration: "The man who loves New England and particularly the spare region of Connecticut loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin lights, the delicacy and slightness of the beauty of the place" (CPP 895). The terms of the description may remind us of "The Motive for Metaphor," where the speaker remembers being "happy in spring, / With the half colors of quarter-things" (CPP 257), and they may bring to mind how Stevens at the time of composing that poem had been getting enthusiastic about the French Barbizon school painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (Richardson 212)—the more so since his evocation of Connecticut's spare colors and thin lights continues with another pictorially rendered image of spring:

When the spring was at its height we should have a water-color not an oil and we should all feel that we had had a hand in the painting of it, if only in choosing to live there where it existed. Now, when all the primitive difficulties of getting started have been overcome, 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...