ABSTRACT
In 1955, when Wallace Stevens received an honorary degree from the Hartt College of Music in his hometown, Hartford, he referred retrospectively to his years in New York City as an “awakening,” to describe, as Peter Brazeau reports, “the surge of creativity during his last years in New York that marked the start of his mature career as a poet” (7). Given Stevens’ departure from New York and eventual move to Hartford in 1916, we might wonder in what sense the years in the city constituted an “awaken-ing” for him, and in what ways this awakening might have been a musical one as well. Certainly, the fact that his poems rarely explicitly refer to the life of the city has reinforced our notion that his years in New York and his ongoing trips to the city lie only on the margins of his poetic life. Yet, it was from New York City that he wrote of his poetic ambition—“to make a music of my own, a literature of my own” (L 79)—and in his journals and letters that he began the practice of hearing, seeing, and recording the impressions with which he would make a “life” of his own in poetry (L 79). Although scholars have long identified Stevens’ versatile musicality (his haunting melodies and his eclectic borrowing of musical forms—from sonatas to variations) as a hallmark of his work, such musical character-istics and structures have not been seen specifically in their relation to his years in New York. For Stevens, however, the city was arguably more than an experiential backdrop to his creation of musical poetry. This chapter speculates that there is a much closer relation between Stevens’ years in and continuous experience of New York and the great musical poetry he pro-duced years after he lived in the city. In the pages that follow, I will argue that the poet’s years in New York and his lifelong visits to the city—his musical activities and reflections, his habit of walking which was nourished there—helped him to shape the poetic style for which he is best known. Journals and letters suggest that his descriptions of his New York experi-ence and his meditations when there not only reflect the importance of the city for Stevens, but themselves exhibit many of the identifying features of his more mature, and characteristically musical, verse.
