WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM


land.24 Crispin's fate prophetically announced Stevens' own safe, middle-
class existence, including a daughter with curls.
 Stevens' poem "Floral Decorations for Bananas" continues the exotic
sexual metaphor, a centerpiece that might be painted as a still life. Another
painting by Rousseau may have served as inspiration: Still Life with Exotic
Fruits. This catalogue contains more than bananas; it is a veritable celebration.
In contrast to the Romantics, the artificial world of the aesthete has been
combined with Nature in Stevens.25 As Celeste Goodridge says of the poem,
"Desire is foiled by an avoidance of contact."26 The persona spoken to is
similar to the one in Stevens' poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," possibly
derived from the first cover of the New Yorker magazine:

 Well, nuncle, this plainly won't do.
 These insolent, linear peels
 And sullen, hurricane shapes
 Won't do with your eglantine.
 They require something serpentine.

 Pile the bananas on planks.
 The women will be all shanks
 And bangles and slatted eyes.

 And deck the bananas in leaves
 Plucked from the Carib trees,
 Fibrous and dangling down,
 Oozing cantankerous gum
 Out of their purple maws,
 Darting out of their purple craws
 Their musky and tingling tongues. (11. 1-5, 17-26)

 The poet Delmore Schwartz identified Stevens' poetics as "a vision
instructed in the museums."27 Buttel links the poem to Duchamp's painting
"Nude Descending a Staircase" (164), which a critic of the 1913 Armory Show
that introduced Cubism to America called "an explosion in a shingle factory."28


24 Jan Pinkerton, "Wallace Stevens in the Tropics: A Conservative Protest," Yale
Review (Winter 1971): 215-27.
25 Bates 103.
26 "Aesthetics and Politics: Marianne Moore's Reading of Stevens," Wallace Stevens
and the Feminine, ed. Melita Schaum (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993) 155-70.
27 Quoted in Michel Benamou, "Wallace Stevens: Some Relations between Poetry
and Painting," The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, ed. Ashley Brown and Robert S.
Haller (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1962) 235.
28 Lensing, A Poet's Growth 164.