For Wallace Stevens, Hartford as Muse.doc

IN those rare moments when Hartford leaps to mind, Im guessing that your head does not then turn towatermelon pavilions,a man with a blue guitar, anold sailor catching tigers in red weatheroran emperor of ice cream.MultimediaSlide ShowLiterary Hartford In Transit: Making Sense of Wallace Stevens (With Help From Some Experts)Related Travel Guide:HartfordA lot of us think of Connecticuts capital as a generic New England way station between Boston and New York. A decent place to stop for pancakes? Sure. A wildly lyrical geyser of the American imagination? Not so much.And yet, as I discovered on a recent weekend trip, Hartford could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery thanks, in large part, to one man. Hartford is the place where the poetWallace Stevensspent a substantial portion of his life, and he composed many of his verses bizarrely exquisite blossoms unlike anything else in the canon of American literature while migrating back and forth on foot between his comfortable house on Westerly Terrace and his office at an insurance company.You can, as I did on a Saturday morning,stroll along the commutethat helped dislodge the mans subconscious musings. Thanks to a few advocates from an organization thats cheekily known as theFriends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, there is a marked walk that winds along for about 2.4 miles, starting at the white-columned colossus of the Hartford, the insurance giant where one of the most creative men in American letters ascended to the position of vice president, and ending at the white-clapboard house where the Pulitzer Prize winner lived.Who knew? Hartford is like that: full of surprises.There are more. Just a few blocks away, on Farmington Avenue, in a 25-room mansion that looks like something from “Downton Abbey: The American Years,” two of the greatest characters in American fiction Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn came to life.Contrary to mythology, Mark Twain did not conjure up his masterpieces while puffing cigars on a Southern riverboat. He wrote them, or at least parts of them, at a table in a third-floor billiard room in his house in Hartford, where he and his family lived for about 17 years. (He also cranked out his books at a summer house in Elmira, N.Y., but either way the slow churn of the Mississippi River was nowhere in sight.)If there were moments back then when “Sam,” as Hartford locals called him, felt a yearning to procrastinate with a little literary chitchat, he could pay a call on his next-door neighbor,Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose “Uncle Toms Cabin” had turned her into the most famous woman in America.Twain, Stowe, Stevens does Hartford haveSedona-likecosmic rays of genius passing through it? Are there magic pyramids of Parnassus buried beneath its landlocked streets? Scholars might know all about the citys pivotal role in the evolution of American literature, but for most of us average readers, this all comes as news.I called Wilson H. Faude, a Hartford historian who served as the first curator for theMark Twain House, and told him that this highway stop in the middle of Connecticut seemed to qualify, at least from a literary standpoint, as a pretty important place.“Bingo,” he said with a jolly tone that suggested I might also soon discover that chocolate is delicious and sunshine is nice. “Hartford is where Tom and Huck were born!”If Hartford doesnt crow about that, Mr. Faude attributes it to the regions taciturn Yankee tendencies. “We dont do enough talking,” he said. “We all know that its here. Why do we have to go public? This is reticent Connecticut.”Even so, it wasnt long before Mr. Faude was regaling me with historical morsels. “At one point, it was said that Hartford was the richest city in America,” he said. It became a vortex of American publishing, which is what originally attracted the likes of Twain in the 19th century, and its dominance in the insurance business is what provided Stevens with a well-kept bourgeois cocoon in the first part of the 1900s. Hartford also produced guns and banks, and a long, high tide of prosperity flooded the city with art and culture. TheWadsworth Atheneum, advertised as “the oldest public art museum in the United States,” was founded in 1842. Its where Pablo Picasso had his first American retrospective.I took a tour of the Mark Twain House on my weekend visit, and I found it unexpectedly opulent. (Our guide told us that Twain and his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, the daughter of a rich coal baron, had spent thousands of dollars a year on its upkeep; they were forced to move out in 1891 after a few lousy tech investments left the author bankrupt.)But for a poetry obsessivelike me, the Stevens walk was the main attraction.This particular perambulation, though, is, like Hartford itself, quite modest. There are no tour guides; in keeping with the private enterprise of creating poetry, youre on your own. Along the walk there are pale slabs of Connecticut granite engraved with verses from one of Wallace Stevenss most indelible poems,“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”Thats about it.Nevertheless, I found the walk to be deeply moving. After all, how often do we get to explore the cranial machinery of a literary titan by slipping into the groove of his daily commute?Stevens never learned to drive. Even though many of his neighbors had no idea what he was up to, he would amble along Asylum Avenue methodically measuring the pace of his steps and murmuring phrases to himself phrases that would become some of the most haunting lines in the English language.“It seems as though Stevens composed poems in his head, and then wrote them down, often after he arrived at the office,” Prof. Helen Vendler, Harvards grande dame of poetry and the author of“Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire,”explained to me in an e-mail. “As for his commute, he enjoyed it profoundly. It was his only time out of doors, alone, thinking, receptive to the influx of nature into all the senses.”Its all too easy to assume that Stevens was some tortured artist forced into a life of Babbitt-y corporate drudgery. In fact, evidence suggests that he rather liked his peaceful routine in Hartford his backyard garden, his wine cellar, even his job at the insurance company.“Stevens enjoyed his work very much,” said James Longenbach, a poet, a professor at the University of Rochester, and the author of“Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.”“It was crucial to his achievement. He turned down an offer to be the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard because he didnt want to leave his work. He continued to go to the office even when he was beyond the mandatory age of retirement. He never showed that he felt any conflict or tension between what might appear to be the different aspects of his life.”Still, the poetry that poured forth from this burghers daily rendezvous with his “interior paramour” to use a phrase from a Stevens lyric can, for the casual reader, border on opaque. “People just throw up their hands and say, I cant understand this, it doesnt make any sense,” said Jim Finnegan, the president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens, which has brought poets like Robert Pinsky and Mark Strand to town for events.None of this deters