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  • Stevens’ Everyday Trips in Ideas of Order
  • Bart Eeckhout

One of the better reasons for organizing academic conferences is that they allow people with special interests to meet and make serendipitous discoveries. So it was that Bonnie Costello and I ran into each other in the picturesque English seaside town of Brighton, late in August last year, when we found ourselves at the annual conference organized by the Modernist Studies Association. The topic of the conference was “Everydayness and the Event” and I had been invited to join a session entitled “Poetic Journeys into the Everyday.” Bonnie had seen the title of my paper, “Reverse Traveling: Wallace Stevens’ Everyday Trips Abroad during the 1930s.” She was eager to hear more as she was herself preparing to give a lecture at the Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash on “Traveling with Wallace Stevens.” Our brief conversation sufficed to make us understand we were coming at our shared subject in very different ways. And so we decided to exchange drafts and run both essays back to back in the Journal. As a result, we are able to offer our readers a little treat to launch this issue: a double opportunity to travel around the world with Stevens—by train, boat, or imaginary balloon. Our Art Editor, Alexis Serio, chimed in beautifully by devising a cover image inspired by Stevens’ own imaginary-artistic travels to Rome.

There is something obviously ironic and playful to this joint enterprise, since we tend to associate Stevens so much with the interiority and socially withdrawn quality of the lyricist’s meditative mind, not with any reportage about travels in the world. Our main image of Stevens is that of the elderly writer who composed the lion’s share of his poetry between the ages of 55 and 75 while living a life for which he almost deserved the nickname of “the hermit of Hartford.” Indeed, the association between Stevens and a homegrown brand of American writing in the tradition of such notorious stick-at-homes as Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickinson is made inevitable by the biographical fact that he never once traveled to Europe. In the end, he quipped that he had “never been closer to Europe than Staten Island” (qtd. in Brazeau 201). To be sure, Stevens did leave his country on two occasions, going on a seven-week hunting trip to British Columbia as a young clerk in a New York law office, and twenty [End Page 7] years later taking an elaborate cruise with his wife through the Caribbean. In his early years at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he was also forced to travel a lot domestically for his job, as Bonnie reminds us at greater length in her essay. And in the 1920s and early ’30s, he was in the habit of making his well-known winter visits to Florida, most famously to Key West. But all of this is less than one would expect from a man who, for several decades, had the financial means to travel, had a large network of foreign correspondents, and had received his artistic formation as a cosmopolitan New Yorker, typically drawn to cultural products from anywhere around the world.

Because we are so used to summing up this critical arc of Stevens’ entire “career,” we tend to forget that Stevens did not in the least plan his life to turn out the way it did. In “‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe,” George Lensing retraces some of the early stages of the poet’s adult life. He usefully reminds us that soon after finishing his studies at Harvard, during his first year in New York City, Stevens was already making a note in his journal, saying, “I hope to get to Paris next summer—and mean to if I have the money” (qtd. in Holly Stevens 90). During his stretched-out engagement to Elsie Kachel, he liked to indulge in elaborate daydreams about pan-European travels, for instance in the following letter he sent her from New York:

Bernard Shaw has just brought out a new thing in London called “The Admirable Bashville.” . . . Wouldn’t it be nice to live...

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