CHARLOTTE WARD


infinite material for phenomenological perspectives.
 At long last Stevens filled the Havana lacuna of Crispin's imagined voyage
by taking the ferry for the weekend when he visited Key West in 1923. "The
Cuban Doctor" could have been encountered there:

 I went to Egypt to escape
 The Indian, but the Indian struck
 Out of his cloud and from his sky.
 This was no worm bred in the moon,
 Wriggling far down the phantom air,
 And on a comfortable sofa dreamed. (11.1-6)

 The sofa could be Henri Rousseau's very own nineteenth-century period
piece, which he depicted in The Dream and is disconcertingly out of place in
the exotic landscape.
 "Academic Discourse at Havana" was first published in the November
1923 issue of Broom. It had been removed from the second issue of Harmonium
(1931) and placed in the collection of Ideas of Order, possibly because it
does not capture an intensely felt moment.45 Stevens was clearly disappointed
in the city of Havana, because it was so urban, not at all what he dreamed
the Caribbean should be. Reality was trite:

 Canaries in the morning, orchestras
 In the afternoon, balloons at night. That is
 A difference, at least, from nightingales,
 Jehovah and the great sea-worm. (11.1-4)

 The casino in the park, now boarded up, was not so picturesque as a
Romantic ruin, like Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey." "The twilights of the mythy
goober khan" (III, 1.9) compares Coleridge's imaginary "Kubla Khan" to a
peanut stand: "a peanut parody/ For peanut people." (11.18-19). Elizabeth
Bishop, like the second generation of English Romantics, who left their own
countries in quest of the exotic, had now left Key West for Brazil. She
reaffirmed Stevens' visionary capacities by incorporating an image from
Stevens' poem into her sestina "A Miracle for Breakfast." Stevens says:

 How pale and how possessed a night it is,
 How full of exhalations of the sea...
 All this is older than its oldest hymn,
 Has no more meaning than tomorrow's bread.
 But let the poet on his balcony
 Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move,
 Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors. (IV, 11.15-21)


45 Glen MacLeod, Wallace Stevens and Modem Art (New Haven: Yale UP, 1993) 158.