Wallace Stevens' Caribbean Dream


 Charlotte Ward
 University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras


 In the constant dialectic of imagination versus reality conducted by the
 American poet Wallace Stevens throughout his life, the Caribbean
 represented Nature at its most supreme. He was already given to long
walks out of doors and the reading of English Romantic poets before entering
Harvard, but there he began publishing poetry of his own as editor of the
Harvard Advocate, encouraged by his teacher George Santayana. As a Special
Student, he was allowed to take just what courses he wanted, such as French
and German literature, and art history. This is well documented in the journals
and early letters edited by his daughter Holly.1
 After moving to New York to pursue a career in journalism, his Harvard
classmate Walter Arensberg, also a native of Pennsylvania, brought him into
contact with the modern French art he collected, as well as such artists as
Marcel Duchamp, who actually lived in Arensberg's apartment.2 Stevens
frequently visited the museums of New York by himself. A highlight of things
to come was chronicled in his journal:

 The most remarkable exhibition of pictures that has been held in New York in
 recent years is the exhibition of the pictures of Sorolla at the Hispanic museum.
 The pictures are extraordinary for the effulgent sunshine in beach scenes
 and for their realism generally. But this is not the realism of every day, but
 the realism say of holiday-of the external world at the height of brilliance."3

 As Kenneth Burke would later say of Stevens, "poetry and imagination
seem equated with the vacational."4

' Souvenirs and Prophecies (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, rpt. Berkeley: U of California
P, 1981).
2 Glen G. MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Company: The "Harmonium" Years 1913-
1923 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1983) 26.
3 March 9, 1909, Souvenirs and Prophecies 213.
4 A Grammar of Motives (NY, 1945) 224, rpt. John J. Ench, Wallace Stevens: Images
and Judgements (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964) 215.