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Wallace Stevens Photos
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Garrett Barcalow Stevens, father of the poet.
(Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Stevens as a choir boy, 1893. (Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) |
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Sybil Gage Weddle, 1909. Sybil may well have been the woman Wallace Stevens would have liked to marry had his financial circumstances allowed him to propose to her when he was in his early twenties. He fondly remembered her in a letter he wrote almost fifty years later to Richard Eberhart, a poet whom he had just visited in Cambridge:
After leaving you, I walked through Hilliard Street . . . until it came out on Cambridge Common by Radcliffe. At the point where it comes out Radcliffe is on the left. At the right there is an old dwelling where one of the most attractive girls in Cambridge used to live: Sybil Gage. . . . Her father was a friend of W. G. Peckham, a New York lawyer, in whose office I used to work at one time, and the two of them, and some others, were, I believe, the founders of the Harvard Advocate. But my principal interest in Mr. Gage . . . was the fact that I was a guest at Peckham’s place in the Adirondacks and who should turn up but this angel. (Photo courtesy John K. Howat, Sybil’s step-grandson.)
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Margaretha Catharine Stevens, mother of the poet.
(Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Wallace Stevens, 1916. (Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) |
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Bust of Elsie Stevens sculpted by Adolphe Weinman that served as the model for the Mercury dime, 1916-1945. (Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) |
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Mercury dime, 1916-45.
(Courtesy Numismatic Guaranty Corporation.) |
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Elsie Stevens feeding ducks in Elizabeth Park. (Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Elsie Stevens by the bridge over the pond in Elizabeth Park. (Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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An outing with colleagues. Left to right: Ralph Mulllen, Stevens’s assistant; unidentified colleague; Stevens,
c. 1929. (Courtesy of Peter Hanchak.) |
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Elsie Stevens with Holly in 1924.
(Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Portrait of Anatole Vidal commissioned by Stevens, who hung it in his bedroom and referred to it in his poem “The Latest Freedman.” Vidal was a Parisian book dealer from whom Stevens initially ordered French books. Vidal later served as his agent to purchase French paintings.
(Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) |
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Stevens in Elizabeth Park, 1922. (Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) |
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Judge Arthur Gray Powell of Atlanta, a business colleague and close friend with a strong interest in literature. (Courtesy David Powell.) |
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Wallace Stevens with Holly in 1925.
(Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Wallace Stevens and Holly near their
Farmington Avenue apartment, 1929.
(Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Stevens home on Westerly Terrace. (Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Wallace Stevens behind his Westerly Terrace home. (Courtesy Huntington Library.) |
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Still Life by Pierre Tal-Coat. (Courtesy Peter Hanchak.) In October 5, 1949,
Stevens wrote to Paule Vidal, who had purchased the painting for him:
I have even given it a title of my own: Angel Surrounded By Peasants. The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion.
This painting inspired the poem “Angel Surrounded by Paysans" that Stevens sent to a literary magazine on October 13, 1949. |
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Hartford Accident and Liability Insurance Company. (Photo by Alison Johnson.) In 2009, the Hartford helped finance the installation of thirteen knee-high markers along the route Stevens walked to work each day. Each marker contains a verse from his poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black-bird.” The marker in front of the Hartford reads:
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
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Stevens’s gravesite in Cedar Hill Cemetery, Hartford. (Photo by Alison Johnson.)
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John N. Serio, former editor of the Wallace Stevens Journal,
and Peter Hanchak, Wallace Stevens’s only grandchild, 2008.
(Photo by Emma Ephraim.)
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