Abstract
Why did Stevens, loving Europe as he did, never visit there? And what did it mean to him as a poet that he didn’t? We know that as early as 1923, Stevens and his wife were able to make a leisurely sea voyage through the Panama Canal, and, on other occasions, he went on to vacation in places like Florida and Maine. He also made a couple of brief visits to Cuba. Eventually, he had the means financially to make a journey across the Atlantic, even as he was able to and did purchase paintings from an art dealer in Paris, carvings and jewellery from Ceylon, and other artefacts from other countries. To the poet for whom ‘life is an affair of places’ instead of ‘people’ (CPP 901), one might expect a visit to Europe to beckon him commandingly.
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Works cited
Mee, Suzi. ‘The Double Life of Wallace Stevens’. Harvard Magazine 82 (Sept.–Oct. 1979): 45–8.
Stevens, Holly. Souvenirs and Prophecies: The Young Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977.
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966.
Stevens, Wallace. ‘From Pieces of Paper’. In George S. Lensing, Wallace Stevens: A Poet’s Growth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 166–200.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
Stevens, Wallace. The Contemplated Spouse: The Letters of Wallace Stevens to Elsie. Ed. J. Donald Blount. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006.
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© 2008 George Lensing
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Lensing, G. (2008). ‘The Switzerland of the Mind’: Stevens’ Invention of Europe. In: Eeckhout, B., Ragg, E. (eds) Wallace Stevens across the Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230583849_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35850-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-58384-9
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