WALLACE STEVENS' CARIBBEAN DREAM 137

8), or "Chicken-Little" constantly warning, "The sky is falling!": "And the rude
leaves fall./ The rain falls. The sky/ Falls and lies with the worms." (11.9-11).
 Transport to Summer (1947) is a new departure. Stevens seems to be
satirizing himself in "The Pure Good of Theory" when he writes, "Then came
Brazil to nourish the emaciated/ Romantic with dreams of her avoirdupois,
green glade/ Of serpents like z rivers simmering," (II, 11.1-3). He deflates it all in
the last stanza with, "This platonic person discovered a soul in the world/ And
studied it in his holiday hotel." (11.19-21).
 Renewed contact with the Caribbean came when Jose Rodriquez Feo, a
Princeton-educated Cuban who had started the magazine Origenes, wrote Stevens
in December 1944 for permission to translate the Baudelaire-like poem "Esth6tique
du Mal" (cf. Les Fleurs du mal). Stevens promptly took out a subscription, and
a long correspondence ensued, documented by Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis
in their edition Secretaries of the Moon (Durham: Duke UP, 1986). The title
comes from the first line of the poem "A Word with Jose Rodriguez Feo:"

 As one of the secretaries of the moon,
 The queen of ignorance, you have deplored
 How she presides over imbeciles. The night
 Makes everything grotesque. Is it because
 Night is the nature of man's interior world?
 Is lunar Habana the Cuba of the self?

 This recalls the poem Stevens wrote about his first visit to Havana. He
became proprietary about the magazine. Unlike Rodriquez Feo, he wanted it
to be exclusively about Cuba, rather than include such critics of international
stature as Maria Rosa Lida on Chaucer or Harry Levin defending Joyce (Letters
495). Rodriquez Feo reported to Peter Brazeau that he told Stevens, "'I have
the sensation that you're sort of plundering me because when I talk about
these things, all the things come into your poetry.' He smiled and sort of
laughed. 'You're a very smart young Cuban fellow.'" (142). An example of
this admiration is the poem "Attempt to Discover Life." Thanking Stevens
for a complimentary copy of Esthetique du Mal, Rodriquez Feo had said, "It
was at dusk that I arrived from San Miguel de los Bailos and tore the carefully
packed package and in an atmosphere of roses and yellow and Uccello blues
I peruse the book." (Letters 528). This was reformulated by Stevens into the
Fauviste scene that opens the poem:

 At San Miguel de los Banios,
 The waitress heaped up black Hermosas
 In the maginificance of a volcano.
 Round them she spilled the roses
 Of the place, blue and green, both streaked.
 And white roses shaded emerald on petals
 Out of the deadliest heat.