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(2008) Wallace Stevens across the atlantic, Dordrecht, Springer.
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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Full citation:
Lensing, G. (2008)., "the Switzerland of the mind": Stevens' invention of Europe, in B. Eeckhout & E. Ragg (eds.), Wallace Stevens across the atlantic, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 13-22.
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