Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens, the mid-20th-century American modernist writer, wrote the famous poem “An Ordinary Evening In New Haven” is featured on this day’s episode of “This Day In New Haven History.”
One spring evening back in 1949 or so, Stevens, an insurance executive from Hartford, sat in a room at the Taft Hotel and determined he was going to describe New Haven.
His room was probably pretty high up because he seemed to be looking down on the spires of the churches on the Green. But you’d never recognize our town in his verse.
What emerged is a famous poem about the difficulty of describing anything, how words are almost like musical notes that evoke but are only translations or response to the unreachable thing itself. The spires that appear in parts of the poem, for instance, could be anybody’s spires, not necessarily New Haven’s.
No matter. New Haven exists at least in the title, so join me for the reading, our final visit this week to the Local History Room of the New Haven Free Public Library. Our town somehow peeks through with a touch of particularly in Stevens’s stanzas.
I contrast Steven’s imagism with Sam Woodworth’s trip through Yale College in 1808 in the travel poem “New-Haven.”
You remember Woodworth, a Boston writer traveling, like Stevens, to places elsewhere and stopping in our town along the way. All this week, he has given us some pretty detailed pictures of Long Wharf, the mud, and maybe a guy who was going to use the occasion of everyone being in church to commit a burglary or two.
In many ways, Steven’s poem, about the inadequacy of language …
These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate
Appearances of what appearances,
Words, lines, not meanings, not communications
… gives the lie to the contention that poetry helps us time-travel into the human heart and gives us headlines missing in documents from history, like newspapers.
On the other hand, Stevens really wanted to describe New Haven. There must have been something about our burg, or the Taft Hotel, or a look somebody gave him in the lobby, or maybe a burger Stevens had at Louis Lunch, that brought out the desire to connect.
And that’s as human as it gets.’‘
CLick on the above sound file to listen to today’s episode.
