WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM


proposed Jean-Francois Regnard's Le LUgataire universal (1708).1 Paul
Scarron, L'Ecolierde Salamanque (1654), is an even earlier source suggested
by Guy Davenport.12 An English source would be the fop Crispinus in Ben
Jonson's Poetaster, who is warned, "You must not hunt for wild, outlandish
terms." It is generally assumed Jonson is referring to the euphuism of Marston
and Dekker's play Satiro-Mastix or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, but the
lineage goes back even further, to the Roman writer Horace's "Crispinus.. .that
ass.. .a goat-skin bellows, panting and puffing," or a character from the Roman
satirist Juvenal.13 A poem composed by Stevens in 1919, but not published
until after his death, adds the St. Crispin patron of shoemakers who is
mentioned in Shakespeare's Henry V, IV, iii, 40-60, and the Spanish Captain
Rodomonte from the Commedia del Arte: "Crispin-valet. Crispin-saint!/
...capitAn profundo, capitAn geloso/...bellissimo, pomposo."14 The later title
by which the poem is usually known, "The Comedian as the Letter C," is from
an edition of the Dictionnarie Larousse, where a clown lounges on the
illuminated letter that begins the C entries.15 The tracking of modernist poets'
intertextual references has resulted in a great deal of scholarly speculation.
Stevens' French reading was so intense that few realized he had never set
foot in Europe.
 In Stevens' poem, Section II, "Concerning the Thunderstorms of Yucatan,"
we find the writer's first significant vision of the Caribbean, as Crispin, the
caricature of a European, travels to the New World:

 In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
 Of the Caribbean amphitheatre,
 In spite of hawk and falcon, green toucan
 And jay, still to the night-bird make their plea,
 As if raspberry tanagers in palms,
 High up in orange air, were barbarous.

 ...He that saw
 The stride of vanishing autumn in a park
 By way of decorous melancholy; he
 That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring,


" The Shaping Spirit (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1950) 139.
12 "Spinoza's Tulips: A Commentary on 'The Comedian as the Letter C," Perspective
7.3 (1954): 147-54.
13 Robert Buttel, Wallace Stevens: The Making of "Harmonium" (Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1967) 196. Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1932, 1934)
314. Satires ofHorace and Persius, trans. Niall Rudd (Harmondworth: Penguin, 1973)
31, 42, 44. Juvenal and Persius, trans. G.G. Ramsay (London: Heinemann, 1918) 5.
14 Rajeer S. Patke, The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge
UP, 1985) 10-12.
15s Enck 85.