Writers Associated with Key West, Florida: #2 Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) was an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut as well as a poet. He first visited Key West in 1922 and liked it so much that he returned to it virtually every winter until 1940, but he never took his wife Elsie or his daughter Holly (born 1924). He stayed at the Casa Marina, and was noted in Key West for his drunken behavior: he once quarrelled with Robert Frost, and broke his hand hitting Hemingway on the jaw, although Hemingway thumped him back into the gutter. Two of his poems were 'The Idea of Order at Key West' and 'Farewell to Florida'.

The First Butterfly of the Year

I find it quite amazing that I don't see a butterfly until well into the month of May, so welcome, speckled wood.

Since before I can remember I've been entranced by butterflies, but ever since I saw Bo Widerberg's movie Elvira Madigan I've been haunted by the final image, frozen on screen, of the uncaptured butterfly, an image indicating the impossibility of the doomed couple to catch, to hold prisoner the ecstatic moment.

The butterfly is often used in literature, although Wordsworth's 'To a Butterfly' leaves me wondering why he bothered to write a rather empty nursery rhyme, and even Robert Frost's 'Blue-Butterfly Day' (much as I love the expression 'sky-flakes'), leaves me far from 'having ridden out desire'.

In Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence brings up the butterfly:

'Ursula was watching the butterflies, of which there were dozens near the water, little blue ones suddenly snapping out of nothingness into a jewel-life, a large black-and-red one standing upon a flower and breathing with his soft wings, intoxicatingly, breathing pure, ethereal sunshine; two white ones wrestling in the low air; there was a halo round them; ah, when they came tumbling nearer they were orangetips, and it was the orange that had made the halo. Ursula rose and drifted away, unconscious like the butterflies.'

 Speaking to Ursula, Birkin has a rather brutal thing to say:

'[H]umanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage – it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings. It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.'

I just prefer to remember a few butterflies I have known:

Such as this small tortoiseshell.

Or this painted lady.

Or this peacock.

Edward Thomas in Steep, Hampshire

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) moved from Kent to Steep, Hampshire, with his family in 1906, and this is where he became a poet.

The Red House on Cockshott Lane was the Thomas family's second home in Steep, and as the above plaque on the house records, he lived here from 1909 to 1913.

2 Yew Tree Cottages, which is set back a little from Church Road and reached by a short passage, was Thomas's last home in Steep, and from this building he enlisted in The Artists' Rifles in 1915.

A similar plaque to the one in Cockshott Lane is also fixed to the wall here.

Thomas frequently took walks around the countryside, and Shoulder of Mutton Hill was one of his preferred spots.

This view gives another indication of the hilly countryside around the village, and shows the rear of Thomas's memorial stone, made in 1937, in the foreground.

'THIS HILLSIDE

IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

EDWARD THOMAS

P O E T

Born in Lambeth 3rd March 1878.

Killed in the Battle of Arras 9th April 1917.

AND  I ROSE  UP  AND KNEW

THAT  I  WAS  TIRED

AND  CONTINUED  MY  JOURNEY'

In 1978, to commemorate the centenary of Edward Thomas's birth, Laurence Whistler designed and engraved two windows for the south wall of the Church of All Saints, Steep. Seven years previously, Whistler had engraved a window remembering the lives of Edward and Helen Thomas in Eastbury, Wiltshire, where Thomas's widow moved to and where she lived until her death in 1966. She had written two books, As It Was and World without End, about her life with her husband. Helen's friend, the artist Joy Finzi, assisted in the commissioning and installation of the Eastbury window.

The left window at Steep (shown above) shows a road across hills, with Thomas's jacket (taken from an original) in the foreground, along with his pipe and stick.

The above image shows a copy of the right window: the window itself was smashed by vandals in 1910. It showed Thomas's poem 'The New House':

The New House

Now first, as I shut the door,
I was alone
In the new house; and the wind
Began to moan.

Old at once was the house,
And I was old;
My ears were teased with the dread
Of what was foretold,

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;
Sad days when the sun
Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs
Not yet begun.

All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learnt how the wind would sound
After these things should be.

At the top of the engraving, behind the title, the house is depicted enshrouded in mist. Below it are a series of doors opening and shutting, the final one opening out onto a battlefield in Flanders. The explanatory notes 'Memorial Windows to Edward Thomas' conclude by saying that from the final door 'something rises that turns into the sun, and then the door-latch he has just closed behind him, in the poem'.

Many thanks to the churchwarden for bringing this picture out to show us.

On the opposite wall is this monument to the war dead in the parish.

And Edward Thomas's name is of course among them.

A very short distance away, on the corner of Mill Lane and Church Road, is another war monument.

It's the kind of thing you may sometimes miss if you don't occasionally step out from the car.

I give three links below, all concerning Matthew Hollis's Edward Thomas simply because Hollis is the most recent of Thomas's biographers. All come from the Guardian, the first two being video clips and the last an article on Thomas's relationship with Robert Frost and Hollis's (possibly none too original) take on the vexed reasons for Thomas's enlisting.

Unfortunately the White Horse Inn eluded me.
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Matthew Hollis showing Sarah Crown Edward Thomas landmarks in Steep (10-minute video)

Matthew Hollis reading from his book Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas (4-minute video)

Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war, by Matthew Hollis

Robert Frost in South Shaftsbury and Bennington, Vermont: Literary New England #11

'ROBERT FROST STONE HOUSE MUSEUM

a literary landmark

So. Shaftsbury, Vermont

Founded by Carole J. Thompson and Dr. Peter J. Stanlis

September 29, 2002

With special thanks to our major donors [etc.]'

The front of the house Robert Frost lived in from 1920 to 1929.

The back of the house.

And back and side elevation.

The present museum is divided into three galleries, the first being the Robert Frost Room, which contains details of Frost's biography and several other features. The above bust of Frost is in bronze and was made by Leo Cherne in 1962. It is on loan from Elinor Frost Wilber.

A note about the sofa reads that this was originally in Robert Frost's town house in Cambridge, MA and passed through a few family hands until Frost's great-grandson Douglas Wilber gave it to the Stone House in 2008.

This was Frost's wife Elinor's rocking chair.

The central hall is dedicated to J. J. Lankes, a woodcut artist with whom Frost originally collaborated on a poem, leading to a long working relationship and lifelong friendship.

A few examples of Lankes's work for Frost.

Finally, I found the 'Stopping by Woods' room the most interesting. Frost wrote his famous 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' in 1922 in this room while working on the title poem of his book New Hampshire.

The museum handout states that Frost said he wrote the poem 'pretty much at one stroke', although this manuscript replica, with all the poet's emendations, shows that Frost was exaggerating a little.

The entire room, as its title suggests, is dedicated to this poem, and along with details of Frost's iambic verse and his rhyming structure, there are details of Edward Connery Lathem's editing of Frost's punctuation.

On a far less serious note, there are also examples of parodies of the well known poem.

And a Christmas card of the poem designed by Frost's grand-daughter Robin Fraser Hudnut for her aunt Jeanne Fraser Blackford.

In the center of the room, Frost's original chest of drawers that was in this room.

Still in Vermont, although a few miles down the road in Bennington, is the town cemetery with the Frost family grave.

'ROBERT LEE FROST

MAR. 26, 1874 – JAN. 29, 1963

"I HAD A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD."'

Elinor died a number of years before him:

'ELINOR MIRIAM WHITE

OCT. 25, 1873 – MAR. 20, 1938

"TOGETHER WING TO WING AND OAR TO OAR."'

And their children.

Emily Dickinson and Amherst, Massachusetts

Emily Dickinson (1830-86) was born in this house - now the Emily Dickinson Museum - on 280 Main Street, Amherst, MA, to Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson. She had a slightly older brother, Austin, and in 1833 her sister Lavinia was born. When she was nine, the family moved to a house on what is now called North Pleasant Street, which was close to the town cemetery. In 1855, Edward bought the old house and the family moved back.

As time went on Emily became he increasingly reclusive, although she retained contact with the outside world by frequent correspondence. Emily wrote about 1800 poems, although only a handful were published in her lifetime. And it was not until 1955 that a scholarly edition of her poetry was published.

In 1856 Austin married Emily's friend Susan Gilbert, and the couple moved into a house next door - The Evergreens - that Edward had had built for them. He also made Austin a partner in his law practice. The Evergreens, where Austin and Susan had three children and remained until their deaths (1895 and 1913 respectively), remains a time capsule that reflects their diverse cultural interests: daughter Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi (herself a writer) preserved the house after her parents' deaths.

Nevertheless, it was not a happy marriage, and Austin carried out - between 1882 and his death fifteen years later - an affair with Mabel Loomis Todd, a woman 27 years his junior. Susan, Todd's husband, and the two sisters next door were well aware of the affair. (Later, Todd was  to be in part responsible for the unfortunate editing - the excision of dashes and non-standard capitalization, etc - of Emily's early posthumously published work.)

This plaque was put up as recently as 1954, but the now disparaging term 'poetess' seems to belong to a far distant time.

Emily Dickinson's headstone is partly obscured by the fence around the family plot in West Cemetery.

The very impressive Amherst Community History Mural contains many figures in Amherst's history, and was painted by David Fichter. It faces West Cemetery, and its purpose is to 'increase understanding of this ancient burial ground and build support for its restoration'.

Amherst's most famous figure is its centerpiece, seen above the close-up with her younger sister Lavinia holding a cat.

Robert Frost needs no introduction, except to mention that he occasionally taught at Amherst College, but the man standing up is certainly far less well known. He is Robert Francis (1901-87), a friend of Frost's  whose poetry includes Stand with Me Here (1936) and Like Ghosts of Eagles: Poems 1966-1974 (1974). In 1940 he bought the cabin 'Fort Juniper' near Amherst and lived in seclusion.

Four writers are represented here. In the foreground is Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85), who went to school with Emily Dickinson and kept in contact with by letter. Hunt was a strong activist for the rights of Native Americans, and considered her A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with some of the Indian Tribes (1882), and her novel Ramona (1884) - which highlights the plight of Native Americans in southern California - as her best work.

Behind her, also writing, is Lilian Garis (1872-54), a journalist in her early career who went on to write many books for children, most notably two series: The Bobbsey Twins (seventy-two books as 'Laura Lee Hope'), and Dorothy Dale (thirteen books as 'Margaret Penrose').

To the left of Garis in the picture, Eugene Field (1850-95) was born in St Louis, Missouri (where his first home is now a museum), but following the death of his mother was brought up by a cousin in Amherst. He is best remembered as a writer of children's poetry, his most famous work being Wynken, Blynken, and Nod (1889).

The writer at the back with the beehive is Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946), who is described as '[a]n early muckraking journalist' in 'A Guide to the Amherst Community History Mural at the West Park Cemetery, Amherst, Massachusetts', published by the Amherst Historical Commission. Baker was a also a writer of fiction and children's stories, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1940 for his study of Woodrow Wilson.

Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts

Beacon Hill is a neighborhood in Boston north of the Public Garden and Boston Common, with the boundaries Storrow Drive to the west, Cambridge Street to the north, Beacon Street to the south, and Somerset Street to the east. Many notable literary figures have lived here, but unfortunately the dense foliage and the parked vehicles make it very difficult to take a decent photo. However, I managed a few.

This quotation on a mural in Charles Street, Beacon Hill, is from Robert Lowell's 'The Ruins of Time', which consists of two sonnets, and the tercet here is from the end of the second sonnet:

'O Rome! From all your palms, dominion, bronze
and beauty, what was firm has fled. What once
was fugitive maintains its permanence.'

This second sonnet is a version of 'A Roma sepultada en ruinas' by Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580–1645), of which the second tercet is:

'¡Oh Roma!, en tu grandeza, en tu hermosura
huyó lo que era firme, y solamente
lo fugitivo permanece y dura.'

And this in turn is a Spanish translation of the fourth sonnet  of the 'Les Antiquités de Rome' sequence (1556) by Joachim du Bellay (c. 1522-60), of which the second tercet is:

'Reste de Rome. Ô mondaine inconstance !
Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps détruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait résistance.'

'From 1865 to 1893

THE HOME OF

FRANCIS PARKMAN

American Historian' 

As I've already mentioned Parkman in the Mount Auburn Cemetery post, I shall say nothing here. Except that it was impossible to photograph the house because the foliage rendered it almost invisible.

Henry David Thoreau once lived in an apartment at 4 Pinckney Street.

Irish-American Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920) was a poet and essayist born in Roxbury, MA, and was a friend of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Her most noted publications are A Roadside Harp (1893) and Patrins (1897). She died in Chipping Camden, England.

'20 Pinckney Street

As a litle girl Louisa May Alcott lived in rented rooms at 20 Pinckney Street. The Alcott home was part of the Boston literary scene during the decades before the Civil War.  Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, was an innovative educator whose friends included Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and William Lloyd Garrison.

In the 1880s, her reputation and fortune secure, Miss Alcott returned to Beacon Hill. She lived at 10 Louisberg Square until her death.'

'ROBERT LEE FROST

1874-1963

AMERICA'S "POET LAUREATE

AND FOUR-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

LIVED AT 88 MT. VERNON STREET

FROM 1938-1941

WHILE TEACHING POETRY

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES,

IT BEGINS IN DELIGHT AND ENDS IN WISDOM."'