Stevens under the Palms

For more than two decades, Wallace Stevens left his gray office at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company to spend his winters at the Casa Marina in Key West. A new critical biography by Thomas Miller exploring these southern visits reveals a poet who was deeply altered by the change of light and latitude. In Connecticut, Stevens was a master of cool, intellectual abstractions; in Key West, he sat in a wicker chair on the hotel veranda, drinking gin and tonic and staring at the blue-green water. The tropical climate did not make him lazy, but rather sharpened his sensory perception, leading to some of his most brilliant and strange poems.

Miller’s book is particularly good on the famous, disastrous fight between Stevens and Ernest Hemingway in February of 1936. Stevens, who was fifty-six and intoxicated, apparently insulted Hemingway’s writing, prompting the younger author to knock him down into the sandy street near the harbor. The poet returned to Hartford with a swollen eye and a fractured hand, but he never let the incident dampen his love for the island. In his letters, he wrote of Key West as a place where the mind could play with the physical world, finding a strange geometry in the palm trees and the slow movement of the sailing sloops.

What emerges from Miller’s study is a portrait of a northern mind trying to find a form for southern excess. Unlike the local writers who sought to capture the rough frontier flavor of the keys, Stevens treated Key West as a laboratory of pure imagination. The hibiscus flowers and the screech of the wild gulls were not local color, but symbols of an exotic reality that challenged his insurance-exec lifestyle. The book reminds us that Stevens’s Florida was not a place of relaxed retirement, but a landscape where he fought his greatest intellectual battles, trying to reconcile the cold northeast with the warm south.