Wallace Stevens was a Pulitzer Prize winning poet who worked as an insurance executive in Hartford
Wallace Stevens lived near Elizabeth Park in Hartford and composed poems in his head on his daily walks.
Elizabeth Park’s page on Wallace Stevens: https://elizabethparkct.org/about-the-park/wallace-stevens
“March…Someone has walked across the snow,
Someone looking for he knows not what.
It is like a boat that has pulled away
From a shore at night and disappeared.
It is like a guitar left on a table
By a woman, who has forgotten it.
It is like the feeling of a man
Come back to see a certain house.
The four winds blow through the rustic arbor,
Under its mattress of vines”
“Vacancy in the Park”, by Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens lived at 118 Westerly Terrace in Hartford, Connecticut. He never learned to drive, so he walked all around Hartford.
A New York Times article describes Stevens’s relationship with Hartford as such: “Hartford could probably rival the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco as a wellspring of psychedelic imagery— thanks, in large part, to one man.” Find the article written by Jeff Gordinier here.
A group called the “Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens” outline the daily walk he did from his home to his place of work in Hartford on this website.
