from Postcards
So you're home again, Redwood Roamer, and ready
To feast . . . Slice the mango, Naaman, and dress it
With white wine, sugar and lime juice. Then bring it,
After we've drunk the Moselle, to the thickest shade
Of the garden. We must prepare to hear the Roamer's
Story . . . The sound of that slick sonata,
Finding its way from the house, makes music seem
To be a nature, a place in which itself
Is that which produces everything else, in which
The Roamer is a voice taller than the redwoods,
Engaged in the most prolific narrative,
A sound producing the things that are spoken.
From Wallace Stevens's poem "Certain Phenomena of Sound," from Transport to Summer. The mangos are from Margaret Street.
Wallace Stevens began visiting South Florida and the Keys in the early 1920s with his good friend Judge Arthur Powell. Stevens was a director at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, and these were prinicipally business trips, with a few days added on for pleasure. He was struck by what he found, so different from his New England upbringing, and his experiences here color many of the poems published in his first two books, Harmonium (1923), and Ideas of Order (1936). Stevens's first extant mention of the place comes in a letter to his wife, the former Elsie Viola Kachel, from Long Key on the tenth of January, 1922. In part, it reads:
Dear Elsie:
...
The contract arrived this morning, but instead of taking tonight's train for the North I am going to wait until tomorrow night's which should get me home on Friday night or Saturday morning. ... The sea is about fifty feet from the cottage in which I slept last night. This morning I just stepped out doors in my pajamas and used them as a bathing suit, taking a surf-bath. There are no ladies here so that one can do as one pleases. The place is a paradise—midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen. What a fool I should be not to come down here when I can give the results already achieved in return and still have a little fun out of it. I wish you could have come—that you could see how gorgeous it is. We must come together as soon as we can and every winter afterwards. I send you a check to enable you to keep things going until I get back.
With love,
Wallace
As it happened, Elsie never did accompany Stevens on his annual jaunt to Florida. Stevens liked to do as he pleased, after all.
Quoted from Wallace Stevens's letter of Tuesday, January 10, 1922, as printed in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens, University of California Press, 1966.
LITTORAL is the year-round online voice of the Key West Literary Seminar. We write about literature, Key West, and the authors who have been or will be part of our annual Seminar. Throughout the year on LITTORAL, you'll find podcasts from our growing audio archives, interviews and book reviews, news about the Seminar, links, commentary, and arcana.
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