In the Connecticut Grain: The Final World of Wallace Stevens

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief.

  WALLACE STEVENS, “Asides on the Oboe”

He loved his lands from the beginning, spoke in 1905 of kissing Colorado’s ground, called Kansas glorious and pronounced Iowa “a superb state.” He was a great walker—seventeen miles he called “a good day’s jaunt” in 1902, and there were days he covered twice as many. For twenty-five years, bent mostly upon business, he crisscrossed the country, keeping journals and writing his wife. At Fort Snelling, in Minnesota, the windblown grass was “better than the Russian ballet, though not unlike it.” In Folsom, Louisiana, plagued by bedbugs and ffies at his hotel, he nevertheless took note of “the pine woods white with mist.” Home from his travels he was a devoted gardener, a cultivator of flower beds and “a large asparagus patch.” At least once he suspected his involvement with places as excessive, a sign of insufficient involvement with people. “Life is an affair of people not of places,” he wrote. “But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble.”