WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM 129

 Most of Stevens' business trips within the United States inspired no poetry.
That was to change on January 9, 1922, when Judge Arthur Powell took him
to Key West for the weekend, described by Stevens as "a cloud full of Cuban
sefioritas, cocoanut palms, and waiters carrying ice water."32 One of the
first poems to be published thereafter, in the Dial (July 1922), was Stevens'
favorite, according to a letter to the poet William Rose Ben6t (263): "The
Emperor of Ice-Cream." It was a favorite of another Key West poet, too,
Elizabeth Bishop, who committed it to memory.33 Like many an abstract
painter, Stevens worked very hard on his titles. Celeste Turner Wright was no
doubt correct in linking it to Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones.34 The
black train porter who briefly becomes emperor of a Caribbean island, until
the inevitable uprising, is being contrasted with a real person from another
Stevens poem, "0 Florida, Venereal Soil": "The negro undertaker/ Killing the
time between corpses/ Fishing for crayfish..." (11.11-13). The poem is related
to a prose sketch Stevens published in the Harvard Advocate (June 16, 1900).
In "Four Characters," two visitors discover a corpse laid out on an ironing
board at a modest residence.35 It could not have been written for Stevens'
daughter, as Richard Ellmann thought in Kenyon Review 10 (Winter 1957),
because she had not even been born.36 James Baird was right to disagree
with Stevens' friend Alfred Kreymborg, that ice cream was a symbol of death.37
Today it is recognized as a celebration of life-ice cream will be around longer
than dictators, and wakes can be joyous occasions in Caribbean lives.

 Call the roller of big cigars,
 The muscular one, and bid him whip
 In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
 Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
 As they are used to wear, and let the boys
 Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
 Let be be finale of seem.
 The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. (11.1-8)

The poem "The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws" could also symbolize a
dictator in the Caribbean:


32 Huntington Library Letter to Ferdinand Reyher, February 2, 1922, in Brazeau 97.
33 George S. Lensing, "Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop: The Way a Poet Should
See, the Way a Poet Should Think," Wallace Stevens Journal 19.2 (Fall, 1995): 120.
34 "Stevens and the Black Emperor of the West, "Arizona Quarterly 35.1 (Spring 1979):
67.
35 Enck 201.
36 Donald E. Stanford, "The Well-Kept Life: the Letters of Wallace Stevens," Southern
Review (Summer 1967): 757-63.
37 "An Early Impression of Wallace Stevens," The Trinity Review 8.3 (May 1954): 15.