Friday, December 1, 2006

Culture in Hartford

My father, who still lives in Simsbury, Connecticut, where I grew up, recently alerted me to this story in the Hartford Courant: It's a proposal, by a professor of English at St. Joseph's College, in West Hartford, to turn the poet Wallace Stevens' home, in Hartford, into a cultural-tourism destination.

Stevens, a Harvard graduate who made his living as an insurance executive, is widely viewed as one of America's great 20th-century poets, sometimes even as the greatest -- yet he's little-known outside of academia. Dennis Barone writes that the

residence belongs to the Episcopal Diocese of Hartford. But imagine it as not just a historic house museum, but as a literary center for contemporary innovative writing and for the consideration of the interstices of 20th-century literature and culture.

It's a great idea, immediately seconded by one Stevens scholar. (The Stevens house would be a modernist counterpoint to the Mark Twain House.) Another Courant reader, however, writes in with a mild objection: Hey, that's my house you're talking about! (Click here and scroll to the second letter.) Yes, Barone probably should have mentioned that a family currently lives there.

Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:03 PM

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