122 CHARoTrrE WARD

 In order to survive on a tight budget, Stevens savored choice tropical fruit.
 For instance, red bananas are mentioned in a letter to his fiancee Elsie on July
 13, 1909.5 Seeking out unusual tropical fruits would continue for the rest of his
 life, food items such as sapodillas for his fellow poet in Key West, Florida,
 Robert Frost (February 25, 1935, Letter, 275). He even moved mangoes by the
 carload (June 13, 1950 Letter to Barbara Church, 682) from New York to his
 Hartford, Connecticut, residence.
 By 1909 Stevens had succumbed to his father's insistence on law as a
better living than writing, but when his law partnership failed, he became
legal consultant to an insurance firm called the American Bonding Company.
The long walks in the suburbs on weekends continued, and he began to
listen to weather reports about the Caribbean. This practice, like the walks,
would be lifelong as well. Parts of a World (1942) contains the poem "The
Search for Sound Free from Motion": "All afternoon the gramaphoon,/ The
world as word,/ Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane."6 "Gramaphoon," a
portmanteau word combination of "gramophone" and typhoon," is typical of
Stevens' neologisms. "Parl-parled," besides meaning "spoke of" in French,
suggests "purple prose." The armchair exotic made escapism his uniquely
eccentric art, when others were practicing armchair communism.
 Stevens' first long poem, "From the Journal of Crispin," was written in less
than a month, for the Blindman Prize sponsored by the Poetry Society of South
Carolina, with $250 donated by W Van R. Whitall. Although the judge, Amy
Lowell, chose Grace Hazard Conklin for the prize, winning honorable mention
in the Chicago-based Poetry magazine of international circulation gave Stevens
his public debut.7 The protagonist of the poem hailed from Bordeaux, probably
suggested by the book Vie de Bordeaux (Philadelphia: Nicolas L. Brown, 1916),
written by a Harvard friend living in New York, Pitts Sandborn.8 Crispin the
valet, from the Commedia del Arte, who occurs in the work of such modern
poets as Verlaine and Laforgue, could have derived from Maurice Sand's
Masques etBouffons (Paris, 1862), owned by Stevens in the English translation
The History of Harlequinade (London, 1915).9 Warren Ramsey has suggested
LeSage, Crispin rival de son matte (1707) as a source.10 William Van O'Connor


5 Holly Stevens, ed., Letters of Wallace Stevens (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966, rpt.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1996) 148.
6 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954; NY: Random House "Vintage Books,"
1990), 11.10-12, 268.
7 George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet's Growth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
UP, 1986) 94, 259.
8 Milton J. Bates. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (Berkeley: U of California P,
1985) 119.
9 James Baird, The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
(Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1968) 204.
10 "Wallace Stevens and Some French Poets," The Trinity Review 8.3 (May 1954): 36-37.