126 CHARLOTTE WARD


Fig. 1: Henri Rousseau, "Le Douanier." "The Dream" (1910)20


 Wallace Stevens the insurance executive, writing poems as he walked to
work through the park in the morning and during his lunch hour, could no
doubt identify with the petit-bourgeois Henri Rousseau, who frequented the
Jardin des Plantes and zoos of Paris for inspiration to paint. Though better
educated than Rousseau, his world-view was similar. Rousseau's Le Rive
would haunt him to the end of his days and supply symbols totally
misunderstood by literary critics.
 "The Comedian as the Letter C" says Crispin intended to visit Havana
next (1, 1.54), but that is not dramatized in the poem, presumably because
Stevens found no source to stimulate his imagination. Appropriate to the
sponsors of the poetry competition, Stevens' protagonist makes "A Nice
Shady Home" in Carolina and produces "Daughters with Curls." Harold Bloom
sees the poem as an anti-Romantic voyage, with Shelley's "Alastor" or Yeats'
"Wanderings of Ossian" in mind.23 The puritanical recoil at the word "festival,"
noted by Bloom, recalls Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, since "goblet
skins" are like the fruits proffered by goblins, which she rejects, obviously a
sexual metaphor. Another commentator links Stevens' attitude to
Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter" in his longing for an exotic, forbidden

23 Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977) 70.