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127-517: The Provincetown Players began in July 1915. Provincetown, Massachusetts , had become a popular summer outpost for numerous artists and writers, bohemian residents from Greenwich Village , New York. On July 22 a group of friends who were disillusioned by the commercialism of Broadway created an evening's entertainment by staging two one-act plays. Constancy by Neith Boyce and Suppressed Desires by Susan Glaspell and George Cram Cook were performed at

254-624: A "great store of codfish", he chose instead to name this outermost tip of land "Cape Cod". Notably, that name referred specifically to the area of modern-day Provincetown; it wasn't until much later that that name was reused to designate the entire region now known as Cape Cod . On November 9, 1620, the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower sighted Cape Cod while en route to the Colony of Virginia . After two days of failed attempts to sail south against

381-680: A Blackbird ". His second period commenced with Ideas of Order (1933), included in Transport to Summer (1947). His third and final period began with the publication of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), followed by The Necessary Angel: Essays On Reality and the Imagination (1951). Many of Stevens's poems, like " Anecdote of the Jar ", " The Man with the Blue Guitar ", " The Idea of Order at Key West ", " Of Modern Poetry ", and "Notes Towards

508-411: A G.I. series that revealed diverticulitis , a gallstone , and a severely bloated stomach. Stevens was admitted to St. Francis Hospital and on April 26 was operated on by Dr. Benedict Landry. It was determined that Stevens was suffering from stomach cancer in the lower region by the large intestines and blocking the normal digestion of food. Lower tract oncology of a malignant nature was almost always

635-528: A Stevens biographer specializing in attention to Stevens as a businessman lawyer, Stevens in part related his poetry to his imaginative capacities as a poet while assigning his lawyer's duties more to the reality of making ends meet in his personal life. Grey finds the poem "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" useful to understanding the approach Stevens took in separating his poetry and his profession, writing: "The law and its prose were separate from poetry, and supplied

762-584: A Sunrise by Wallace Stevens . Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones opened the 1920–21 season and was an overnight hit. The cast was led by Charles Gilpin , who was the first African-American professional actor to perform with a primarily white company in the United States. Alexander Woollcott in The New York Times said that The Emperor Jones was an "extraordinarily striking and dramatic study of panic fear.” O’Neill's play “reinforces

889-626: A Supreme Fiction", deal with the art of making art and poetry in particular. His Collected Poems (1954) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania , in 1879 into a Lutheran family of Dutch and German descent. John Zeller, his maternal great-grandfather, settled in the Susquehanna Valley in 1709 as a religious refugee. The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as

1016-421: A constant theme throughout Stevens's poetry: "A great many of Stevens's poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement." In the end, reality remains. The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real. I am the angel of reality, seen for

1143-436: A form of relief for Stevens by way of contrast with poetry, as the milkman (portrayed as the realist in the poem) relieves from the moonlight, as the walk around the block relieves the writer's trance like absorption. But the priority was clear: imagination, poetry, and secrecy, pursued after hours were primary, good in themselves; reason, prose, and clarity, indulged in during working hours, were secondary and instrumental". In

1270-529: A good death.” After the formal dissolution of the Players, several associates sought to create a producing organization that would carry on their success and use the Players' name. When Jig Cook died in Greece January 1924, Susan Glaspell could not prevent creation of a new producing organization, but she fought to protect the name "The Provincetown Players" from the new partnership. In January 1924,

1397-459: A late flowering of artistic genius. His contemporary Harriet Monroe called Stevens "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to him". Vendler notes that there are three distinguishable moods present in Stevens's long poems: ecstasy, apathy, and reluctance between ecstasy and apathy. She also notes that his poetry was highly influenced by

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1524-476: A moment standing in the door. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set, And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings, Like watery words awash; A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition appareled in Apparels of such lightest look that

1651-435: A mortal diagnosis in the 1950s. This was withheld from Stevens, but his daughter Holly was fully informed and advised not to tell her father. Stevens was released in a temporarily improved ambulatory condition on May 11 and returned to his home to recuperate. His wife insisted on trying to attend to him as he recovered but she had suffered a stroke in the previous winter and was not able to assist as she had hoped. Stevens entered

1778-650: A naturally deep, protected basin that was considered the best along the coast. In 1654, the Governor of the Plymouth Colony purchased this land from the Chief of the Nausets, for a selling price of two brass kettles, six coats, 12 hoes, 12 axes, 12 knives and a box. That land, which spanned from East Harbor (now known as Pilgrim Lake)—near the present-day border between Provincetown and Truro —to Long Point ,

1905-713: A non-degree three-year special student from 1897 to 1900, where he served as the 1901 president of The Harvard Advocate . According to his biographer Milton Bates, Stevens was personally introduced to the philosopher George Santayana while living in Boston and was strongly influenced by Santayana's book Interpretations of Poetry and Religion . Holly Stevens, his daughter, recalled her father's long dedication to Santayana when she posthumously reprinted her father's collected letters in 1977 for Knopf. In one of his early journals, Stevens gave an account of spending an evening with Santayana in early 1900 and sympathizing with Santayana about

2032-399: A peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began. The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book Poets of Reality , the theme of universal fluctuation is

2159-402: A poor review published at that time of Interpretations . After his Harvard years, Stevens moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School , graduating with a law degree in 1903, following the example of his two other brothers with law degrees. On a trip back to Reading in 1904, Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886–1963, also known as Elsie Moll),

2286-552: A prominent part of the Provincetown Players. Susan Glaspell and Jig Cook were partners in organizing the Players. Neith Boyce and Glaspell (who co-wrote a play with her husband Cook) wrote the first two plays performed by the Players. Mary Heaton Vorse donated the use of the fish house on Lewis Wharf as the Players' first home for two summers in Provincetown. Similarly, the Players gave voice to women artists. Of

2413-479: A reflective surface to represent the horizon and create a greater sense of depth than a flat cyclorama. The Emperor Jones ran for 200 performances. After the attention The Emperor Jones received, along with a Broadway transfer of the play, some members of the Players began to see their highest goal as gaining commercial and critical success. The mission of the Players became more clouded when subsequent plays were transferred to Broadway, though less successfully, and

2540-578: A revival of Bound East for Cardiff . Other plays were by Neith Boyce , Susan Glaspell , Floyd Dell , Rita Wellman and Harry Kemp. A significant addition to the Players was director Nina Moise , a trained actor and young director who began helping the Players with their staging and interpretation of plays in 1917. In the 1917–18 season Edna St. Vincent Millay and her sister Norma joined the Players as actors. The season featured three new plays by O'Neill, three by Glaspell, and their first full-length play, The Athenian Women, written by George Cram Cook. In

2667-473: A sequence titled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry ) was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with Santayana. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such

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2794-514: A significant gay population, especially during the summer tourist season, when restaurants, bars and small shops serving the tourist trade were open. There had been a gay presence in Provincetown as early as the start of the 20th century as the artists' colony developed, along with experimental theatre. Drag queens could be seen in performance as early as the 1940s in Provincetown. In 1978 the Provincetown Business Guild (PBG)

2921-402: A social realist style. The anti-commercial impulse, emphasis on artistic expression, and collective decision-making of the Provincetown Players were manifestations of the bohemian spirit of Greenwich Village of the 1910s. The Players were founded from a network of friendships among artists, intellectuals and radicals. Mabel Dodge , who hosted the most celebrated literary salon of the period, was

3048-469: A speculative interpretation of Stevens under this approach. In his 2016 book Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens , Simon Critchley indicates a refinement of the appreciation of the interaction of reality and poetry in Stevens's poems, writing: "Steven's late poems stubbornly show how the mind cannot seize hold of the ultimate nature of reality that faces it. Reality retreats before

3175-605: A summer resident, is a major participant in the festival. In November 2011, the Provincetown Theater Company became the first theater company in New England to stage a live-action dramatic theatrical presentation of horror-fantasy author H.P. Lovecraft . The story was Lovecraft's 1919 classic, "The Picture in the House," and was described as "...the macabre come to life." The adaptation was produced for

3302-448: A time (during The Great Depression ) when many Americans were out of work, searching through trash cans for food." Harriet Monroe , reviewing Harmonium for Poetry , wrote: "The delight which one breathes like a perfume from the poetry of Wallace Stevens is the natural effluence of his own clear and untroubled and humorously philosophical delight in the beauty of things as they are." By 1934, Stevens had been named vice president of

3429-541: A township. The name chosen by its inhabitants was "Herringtown", which was rejected by the Massachusetts General Court in favor of "Provincetown". The act of incorporation provided that inhabitants of Provincetown could be landholders, but not landowners. They received a quit claim to their property, but the Province retained the title. The land was to be used as it had been from the beginning of

3556-503: A turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone? In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea that satisfies the imagination and writes, "The world imagined is the ultimate good." Stevens places this thought in the individual human mind and writes of its compatibility with his own poetic interpretation of God, writing: "Within its vital boundary, in

3683-400: A way that the old religious idea of God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in old religious ideas. "[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life ... Powerful force though

3810-507: A year. This did not slow down the town's economy, however. Provincetown's tourist season has expanded, and the town has created festivals and week-long events throughout the year. The most established are in the summer: the Portuguese Festival, Bear Week, and PBG's Carnival Week. In 2017, a memorial was dedicated to those who lost their lives to AIDS. For nearly all of Provincetown's recorded history, life has revolved around

3937-408: A young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner , and stenographer . After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her poorly educated and lower-class. As The New York Times reported in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime." A daughter, Holly,

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4064-500: Is a New England town located at the extreme tip of Cape Cod in Barnstable County, Massachusetts , in the United States. A small coastal resort town with a year-round population of 3,664 as of the 2020 United States Census , Provincetown has a summer population as high as 60,000. Often called "P-town" or "Ptown", the locale is known as a vacation destination for its beaches, harbor , artists and tourist industry. At

4191-742: Is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, the pillowed porch, The book and candle in your ambered room. According to Mariani, Stevens had a large, corpulent figure throughout most of his life, standing 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighing as much as 240 pounds (110 kg). Some of his doctors put him on medical diets. On March 28, 1955, Stevens went to see Dr. James Moher for accumulating detriments to his health. Moher's examination did not reveal anything, and he ordered Stevens to undergo an x-ray and barium enema on April 1, neither of which showed anything. On April 19 Stevens underwent

4318-445: Is around 30 inches (76 cm). The average snowiest month is February, which corresponds to the annual peak in nor'easter activity. According to the U.S. census of 2010 , there were 2,942 people living in the town (down 14.3% since 2000). The population density was 304.2 inhabitants per square mile (117.5/km ). There were 4,494 housing units (up 15.5%) at an average density of 464.7 per square mile (179.4/km ). The racial makeup of

4445-654: Is considered the oldest gay bar in the US and Frommer's calls it "the nation's premier gay bar". Provincetown is the setting for the annual Women's Week festival. Held in mid-October since 1984 and attended by almost 2,000 women, it is the "longest running lesbian cultural event in the Northeast". Since 1975, Provincetown has been the host city to Fantasia Fair, the world's first and longest-running annual conference that focuses on gender diversity and transgender issues. The Provincetown International Film Festival , honors

4572-486: Is led by Hines, Macksey, Simon Critchley , Glauco Cambon, and Paul Bove . These four schools offer occasional agreement and disagreement of perspective; for example, Critchley reads Bloom's interpretation of Stevens as in the anti-realist school while seeing Stevens as not in the anti-realist school of poetic interpretation. Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came largely only as he approached 40 years of age. His first major publication (four poems from

4699-411: Is located at the very tip of Cape Cod , encompassing a total area of 17.5 square miles (45 km ) − 55% of that, or 9.7 sq mi (25 km ), is land area, and the remaining 7.8 sq mi (20 km ) water area. Surrounded by water in every direction except due east, the town has 21.3 miles (34.3 km) of coastal shoreline. Provincetown is bordered to the east by its only neighbor,

4826-450: Is not possible. Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible." As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of

4953-497: Is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have." Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction", an idea that would serve to correct and improve old notions of religion along with old notions of

5080-442: Is that you write about subjects. Frost: The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about bric-a-brac. By late February 1947, with Stevens approaching 67 years of age, it became apparent that he had completed the most productive ten years of his life in writing poetry. February 1947 saw the publication of his volume of poems Transport to Summer , which was positively received by F. O. Mathiessen in The New York Times . In

5207-486: The Southern Review , Hi Simons wrote that much of early Stevens is juvenile romantic subjectivist, before he became a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years. Stevens, whose work became meditative and philosophical, became very much a poet of ideas. "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully", he wrote. Of the relation between consciousness and

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5334-575: The Province of Massachusetts Bay . "Cape Cod" was thus officially renamed the "Province Lands". The first record of a municipal government with jurisdiction over the Province Lands was in 1714, with an Act that declared it the "Precinct of Cape Cod", annexed under control of Truro. On June 14, 1727, after harboring ships for more than a century, the Precinct of Cape Cod was incorporated as

5461-550: The 11 years immediately preceding its publication, Stevens had written three volumes of poems: Ideas of Order , The Man with the Blue Guitar , Parts of a World , and Transport to Summer . These were all written before Stevens took up the writing of his well-received The Auroras of Autumn . In 1950–51, when Stevens received news that Santayana had retired to live at a retirement institution in Rome for his final years, Stevens composed his poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome": It

5588-684: The 1918–19 season The Players moved to 133 Macdougal Street and called the theater "The Provincetown Playhouse" . The 1918–1919 season included The Princess Marries the Page by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The Players was founded as an amateur group, and initially did not allow critics to attend to review its plays, hoping to protect its experimental nature. But during their first New York season, some members began voice their desire to see their work toward becoming professional actors. Finally they voted to allow critics tickets to performances, even though some founding members considered this means of evaluation to be

5715-460: The 22nd Fall Playwright's Festival. Veterans Memorial Community Center serves as the area community center. By 2012, Veterans Memorial Elementary School closed and was being refurbished to become a community center. In 2014, the town government considered building a second floor on the facility to add affordable housing. Provincetown is governed, like most New England towns, by the open town meeting form of government. The citizens, gathered in

5842-541: The Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20. By early June he was still sufficiently stable to attend a ceremony at the University of Hartford to receive an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree. On June 13 he traveled to New Haven to collect an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University. On June 20 he returned to his home and insisted on working for limited hours. On July 21 Stevens

5969-638: The Casa Marina hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He first visited in January 1922, while on a business trip. "The place is a paradise," he wrote to Elsie, "midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen." Key West's influence on Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order. In February 1935, Stevens encountered

6096-631: The Players announced a suspension of their 1922–23 season. Though Cook wrote his subscribers promising a season beginning in October 1923, he and Glaspell remained in Greece, and the original Provincetown Players did not produce again. In 1923 the primary members of the Provincetown Players’ corporation voted to formally disband. Jig Cook had already written to the company, before he left in 1922, that they had given “the theater they had loved

6223-540: The Provincetown Players gave opportunities to women and challenged the sexual segregation of commercial theater. The Little Theatre Movement in America came about in reaction to the tepid entertainment offered by the commercial theater. In an effort to appeal to a mass audience, Broadway took few chances with untested plays and playwrights. The Little Theatres provided an outlet for American playwrights, and stories of social significance. They were predominantly performed in

6350-582: The Provincetown Players was at 139 Macdougal Street, two doors down from the Liberal Club at 135 Macdougal, a gathering place for young radicals. Djuna Barnes , Theodore Dreiser , Susan Glaspell , Robert Edmond Jones , James Light , Edna St. Vincent Millay , Eugene O’Neill , John Reed , Wallace Stevens , Marjory Lacey-Barker , Cleon Throckmorton , and Charles Demuth . Notes Further reading Provincetown, Massachusetts Provincetown ( / ˈ p r ɒ v ɪ n s ˌ t aʊ n / )

6477-543: The Sun Gallery was run by Yvonne Andersen and Dominic Falcone. It was an art exhibition that took place during the summer where young and up and coming artists could show their work. The Fine Arts Work Center is a nonprofit educational enterprise, located in Provincetown since 1968. Its stated mission is to encourage the growth and development of emerging visual artists and writers through residency programs, to propagate aesthetic values and experience, and to restore

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6604-565: The USDA considered Provincetown's residents in the 2000s to still be rural and to still require such federal assistance In 2003, Provincetown received a $ 1.95 million low interest loan from the Rural Development program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help rebuild the town's MacMillan Pier . It primarily serves the town's active fishing fleet, and also tourists and high-speed ferries. The Atlantic House in Provincetown

6731-536: The abandoned buildings. By the early decades of the 20th century, the town had acquired an international reputation for its artistic and literary productions. The Provincetown Players was an important experimental theatre company formed during this period. Many of its members lived during other parts of the year in Greenwich Village in New York, and intellectual and artistic connections were woven between

6858-400: The age of 18 living within them, and 76.4% were non-families. The average household size was 1.64 persons/household, and the average family size was 2.55. The distribution of the population, broken down by age and gender, is shown in the population pyramid. In 2010, 6.8% of the population was under the age of 18, and the median age was 52.3. There were 1,602 males and 1,340 females. For 2011,

6985-516: The area of dunes and small ponds extending from Mount Ararat in the east to Race Point in the west, along the Massachusetts Bay shore. The Cape Cod Bay shoreline extends from Race Point to the far west, to Wood End in the south, eastward to Long Point , which in turn points inward towards the town, and provides a natural barrier for Provincetown Harbor. All three points are marked by lighthouses. The town's population center extends along

7112-643: The bespectacled Hemingway, who seemed to weave like a shark, and Papa hitting him one-two and Stevens going down "spectacularly," as Hemingway would remember it, into a puddle of fresh rainwater. In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued. According to Mariani, the exchange in Key West in February 1940 included the following comments: Stevens: Your poems are too academic. Frost: Your poems are too executive. Stevens: The trouble with you Robert,

7239-490: The best in independent and avant-garde film. Among the honorees for 2014 were actress Patricia Clarkson and director David Cronenberg . Previous honorees include Matt Dillon , Harmony Korine , Parker Posey , Roger Corman , Vera Farmiga , Darren Aronofsky , Quentin Tarantino , Jane Lynch , Gael García Bernal , Tilda Swinton , Kathleen Turner , Jim Jarmusch , Todd Haynes , Gus Van Sant , and John Waters . Waters,

7366-667: The census. In 1940, Catharine Sargent Huntington , Edwin Pettit, and Virginia Thoms founded the Provincetown Playhouse on the Wharf. The playhouse replaced an older structure that existed between 1915 and 1924. Huntington served as owner and manager of the playhouse until 1973. During her time as manager, a Eugene O'Neill drama was produced each summer season, and the theater hosted an O'Neill Festival in 1966, during which ten of his plays were produced. From 1955 to 1959,

7493-401: The central mind We make a dwelling in the evening air, In which being there together is enough. Stevens concludes that God and human imagination are closely identified, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with that old religious idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in

7620-413: The cities by rail. The railroad was not the only late arrival to Provincetown. Even roads within the town were slow to be constructed: "There was then no road through the town. With no carts, carriages, wagons, horses or oxen, why a road? ... Here every man had a path from his house to his boat or vessel, and once launched, he was on the broad highway of nations without tax or toll. There were paths to

7747-535: The colony—a place for the making of fish. All resources, including the trees, could be used for that purpose. In 1893 the Massachusetts General Court changed the Town's charter, giving the townspeople deeds to the properties they held, while still reserving unoccupied areas. The population of Provincetown remained small through most of the 18th century. The town was affected by the American Revolution

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7874-521: The commercial managers' interpretation of public taste.” On September 19, 1916, Cook turned the first floor parlor of an apartment at 139 Macdougal Street, an 1840 brownstone row house, into a theatre, which the Players dubbed “The Playwright’s Theater.” The Players developed a pattern of producing a "bill" of three new one-act plays every two weeks over a 21-week season. The first New York season in 1916–17 presented nine “bills” between November and March, including three new O’Neill plays, which included

8001-444: The company. After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his job at The Hartford. Throughout his life, Stevens was politically conservative. The critic William York Tindall described him as a Republican in the mold of Robert A. Taft . Stevens made numerous visits to Key West , Florida, between 1922 and 1940, usually staying at

8128-566: The criteria of commercial theater, and therefore a violation of the mission of The Players. At the end of the third New York season, Cook and Glaspell decided to step away from the Players for a year-long sabbatical (1919–20). During the sabbatical the theater's day-to-day management was overseen by business manager Mary Eleanor Fitzgerald, known to all as "Fitzi," and James Light. The 1919–20 season ("The Season of Youth") included three plays by Djuna Barnes , two by Eugene O’Neill, Aria Da Capo by Edna St. Vincent Millay , and Three Travelers Watch

8255-411: The demography of resort towns . They often reveal unusual results, as in this case, where the number of housing units far exceeds the Town's total population, where that number of housing units rose 15% while the population dropped 14%, and where nearly 61% of the housing stock is vacant, with 53% designated "for seasonal, recreational, or occasional use", according to the census. In the decade spanning

8382-439: The drain of casting multiple productions as well as continuing their work on Macdougal street drained them. Commercial success eroded the collective spirit of experimentation on which the Provincetown Players had been formed. As a result of the growing pressure to succeed in commercial terms, and with no new playwrights coming to them to be developed, Cook and Glaspell asked to incorporate the "Provincetown Players" so as to protect

8509-791: The early reception of his poems was oriented to symbolic reading of them, often using simple substitution of metaphors and imagery for their asserted equivalents in meaning. For Vendler, this method of reception and interpretation was often limited in its usefulness and would eventually be replaced by more effective forms of literary evaluation and review. After Stevens's death in 1955, the literary interpretation of his poetry and critical essays began to flourish with full-length books written about his poems by such prominent literary scholars as Vendler and Harold Bloom . Vendler's two books on Stevens's poetry distinguished his short poems and his long poems and suggested that they be considered under separate forms of literary interpretation and critique. Her studies of

8636-518: The end of his life, Stevens had left uncompleted his larger ambition to rewrite Dante's Divine Comedy for those who "live in the world of Darwin and not the world of Plato ." The initial reception of Stevens's poetry followed the publication of his first collection of poems, Harmonium , in the early 1920s. Comments on the poems were made by fellow poets and a small number of critics including William Carlos Williams and Hi Simons. In her book on Stevens's poetry, Helen Vendler writes that much of

8763-401: The estimated median income for a year-round household in the town was $ 46,547, with a mean household income of $ 74,840. For families, the median income was $ 87,228, and the mean is $ 84,050. For nonfamily households, the median income was $ 42,375, and the mean, $ 71,008. Median earnings for male full-time, year-round workers was $ 49,688, versus $ 36,471 for females. The per capita income for the town

8890-531: The evaluation of surety insurance claims as follows: "If Stevens rejected a claim and the company was sued, he would hire a local lawyer to defend the case in the place where it would be tried. Stevens would instruct the outside lawyer through a letter reviewing the facts of the case and setting out the company's substantive legal position; he would then step out of the case, delegating all decisions on procedure and litigation strategy." In 1917 Stevens and his wife moved to 210 Farmington Avenue, where they remained for

9017-530: The former lover of founding member of the Players Jack Reed (actor) . Their love affair was the thinly disguised subject matter of the first Players production, Constancy . Max Eastman , editor of the radical magazine The Masses , also participated early on with the Players; his wife at the time, Ida Rauh, became one of their most important actresses, whose work with the Players continued after their split in early 1917. The first New York theater for

9144-407: The forty-seven playwrights whose work was produced by the Provincetown Players, seventeen were women. Prominent among these playwrights were Glaspell (who later won a Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1931 for her play, Alison's House ); Boyce, Djuna Barnes , Louise Bryant , Rita Wellman, Mary Carolyn Davies, and Edna St. Vincent Millay . In addition to challenging the artistic status quo of Broadway,

9271-456: The fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. In Opus Posthumous , Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality

9398-474: The group met and, led by Cook and John Reed , formally organized "The Provincetown Players," voting to produce a season in New York City. Jig Cook was elected president of the newly constituted organization. The Players were founded to “establish a stage where playwrights of sincere, poetic, literary and dramatic purpose could see their plays in action and superintend their production without submitting to

9525-545: The harbor, south of the Seashore's lands. Mount Ararat was named after Noah's landing place , while Mount Gilboa, and another dune, was named for the mountain described in the book of Samuel . The town of Provincetown has a warm-summer humid continental climate ( Dfb ), closely bordering on oceanic climate . The plant hardiness zone is 7a, with an average annual extreme minimum air temperature of 4.9 °F (−15.1 °C). The average seasonal (Nov–Apr) snowfall total

9652-726: The home of Hutchins Hapgood and Neith Boyce. The evening was a success and an additional performance was organized. Mary Heaton Vorse donated the use of the fish house on Lewis Wharf, where a makeshift stage was assembled. The two one-acts which had been presented at the Hapgood home were restaged in August, and a second bill of two new plays was presented in September: Change Your Style by George Cram Cook and Contemporaries by Wilbur Daniel Steele. They were excited about their "creative collective". Enthusiasm for

9779-464: The home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and moved to Hartford , where he remained for the rest of his life. Stevens's career as a businessman-lawyer by day and a poet during his leisure time has received significant attention, as summarized in Thomas Grey's The Wallace Stevens Case . Grey has summarized parts of the responsibilities of Stevens's day-to-day life that involved

9906-520: The idea of God of which Stevens was critical. In this example from the satirical " A High-Toned Old Christian Woman ", Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality: Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make

10033-560: The imagination before the reason has established them." Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is a lyrical poetic work of three parts, containing 10 poems each, with a preface and epilogue opening and closing the entire work of three parts. It was first published in 1942 and represents a comprehensive attempt by Stevens to state his view of the art of writing poetry. Stevens studied the art of poetic expression in many of his writings and poems, including The Necessary Angel , where he wrote, "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what

10160-416: The imagination that shapes and orders it. Poetry is therefore the experience of failure. As Stevens puts it in a famous late poem, the poet gives us ideas about the thing, not the thing itself." The reception and interpretation of Stevens's poetry have been widespread and of diverse orientation. In their book The Fluent Mundo Leonard and Wharton define at least four schools of interpretation, beginning with

10287-556: The impression that for strength and originality he has no rival among American writers for the stage.” Cook used the production of The Emperor Jones to advocate for a striking scenic innovation, spending over 500 dollars on the set alone – the construction of a dome in the Playhouse modeled on the scenic element used in art theaters in Europe. The dome ( kuppelhorizont ) used a “combination of vertical and horizontal curvatures” as

10414-523: The late 20th century is Daniel Fuchs's The Comic Spirit of Wallace Stevens . Interest in the reading and reception of Stevens's poetry continues into the early 21st century, with a full volume dedicated in the Library of America to his collected writings and poetry. In his book on the reading of Stevens as a poet of what he calls "philosophical poetry", Charles Altieri presents his own reading of such philosophers as Hegel and Wittgenstein while presenting

10541-725: The longer poems are in her book On Extended Wings and lists Stevens's longer poems as including " The Comedian as the Letter C ", " Sunday Morning ", "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle", "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery", "Owl's Clover", " The Man with the Blue Guitar ", "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War", "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction", "Esthetique du Mal", "Description without Place", "Credences of Summer", "The Auroras of Autumn", and his last and longest poem, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven". Another full-length study of Stevens's poetry in

10668-561: The mainland. Provincetown is 45 miles (72 km) east by southeast from Boston by air or sea, and 115 miles (185 km) by road. About 4,500 acres, or about 73% of the town's land area, is owned by the National Park Service , which operates the Cape Cod National Seashore , leaving about 2.7 sq mi (7.0 km ) of land under the town's jurisdiction. To the north lie the "Province Lands",

10795-416: The marriage suffered as a result, but the couple remained married. In his biography of Stevens, Paul Mariani relates that the couple was largely estranged, separated by nearly a full decade in age, though living in the same home by the mid-1930s. Mariani writes: "there were signs of domestic fracture to consider. From the beginning, Stevens, who had not shared a bedroom with his wife for years now, moved into

10922-555: The master bedroom with its attached study on the second floor." After working in several New York law firms between 1904 and 1907, Stevens was hired in January 1908 as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become vice president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri . When this job was made redundant after a merger in 1916, he joined

11049-419: The mid-1960s, Provincetown saw population growth. The town's rural character appealed to the hippies of the era; property was relatively cheap and rents were correspondingly low, especially during the winter. Many of those who came stayed and raised families. Commercial Street, where most of the town's businesses are located, gained numerous cafés, leather shops, and head shops . By the 1970s, Provincetown had

11176-433: The mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one .../ How high that highest candle lights the dark." Imaginative knowledge of the type described in "Final Soliloquy" necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination that can never attain a direct experience of reality. We say God and the imagination are one ... How high that highest candle lights the dark. Out of this same light, out of

11303-429: The most protected mooring place in Provincetown, had a 1,000-foot-wide (305 m) inlet from Provincetown Harbor, and effectively blocked off access to Provincetown by land. Until the late 19th century, no road led to Provincetown – the only land route connecting the village to points back toward the mainland was along a thin stretch of beach along the shore to the north (known locally as the "backshore"). A wooden bridge

11430-470: The mouth of the East Harbor was diked to enable the laying of track for the arrival of the railroad. The railroad was completed, to great fanfare, in 1873; and the wooden bridge and sand road was finally replaced by a formal roadway in 1877. The railroad terminated at Railroad Wharf, known today as MacMillan Pier. It provided an easy means for fishermen to offload their vessels and ship their catch to

11557-413: The name. They left in 1922 to travel to Greece after O'Neill fired Cook as the director of his play The Hairy Ape and they felt he was using the Players as a try-out for its Broadway run without apology. James Light succeeded Cook as director of the play, and took over the leadership of the Provincetown Players. Though the 1921–22 season finished without the public knowing that Cook and Glaspell had left,

11684-475: The neighbors, paths to school, paths to church; tortuous paths perhaps, but they were good pilots by night or day, on land or water. Besides, at low water there was a road such as none else could boast, washed completely twice a day from year to year, wide enough and free enough and long enough, if followed, for the armies of the Netherlands." The town's internal road layout reflects the historic importance of

11811-400: The new group premiered The Spook Sonata (a translation of August Strindberg ’s Ghost Sonata ). It marked a new phase in the life of the company that was still identified in the popular imagination as the Provincetown Players. A triumvirate of Robert Edmond Jones , Kenneth Macgowan , and Eugene O’Neill directed the organization; it operated as “The Experimental Theatre, Inc.” and produced in

11938-434: The next seven years and where he completed his first book of poems, Harmonium . From 1924 to 1932 he resided at 735 Farmington Avenue. In 1932 he purchased a 1920s Colonial at 118 Westerly Terrace, where he resided for the remainder of his life. According to Mariani, Stevens was financially independent as an insurance executive by the mid-1930s, earning "$ 20,000 a year, equivalent to about $ 350,000 today [2016]. And this at

12065-413: The other hand, relied on finished products and expansion. The Fall 1929 stock market crash abruptly added to the theater's burdens. After the final performance of Winter Bound by Thomas H. Dickinson on December 14, 1929, the theater company closed for good. Helen Deutsch began managing the company in 1927 while a senior at Barnard College, until its closure, then writing a book about it. Women were

12192-547: The paintings of Paul Klee and Paul Cézanne : Stevens saw in the paintings of both Paul Klee—who was his favorite painter—and Cézanne the kind of work he wanted to do himself as a Modernist poet. Klee had imagined symbols. Klee is not a directly realistic painter and is full of whimsical and fanciful and imaginative and humorous projections of reality in his paintings. The paintings are often enigmatic or full of riddles, and Stevens liked that as well. What Stevens liked in Cézanne

12319-542: The places. In 1898 Charles Webster Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod School of Art, said to be the first outdoor school for figure painting, in Provincetown. Film of his class from 1916 has been preserved. The town includes eight buildings and two historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places : Provincetown Historic District and Dune Shacks of Peaked Hill Bars Historic District . In

12446-553: The poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The two men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens had been drunk and acted inappropriately. According to Mariani, Stevens often visited speakeasies during Prohibition with both lawyer friends and poetry acquaintances. The following year, Stevens was in an altercation with Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West. Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and

12573-718: The prime advocates of Stevens found in the critics Harvey Pearce and Helen Regeuiro, who supported the thesis "that Stevens's later poetry denies the value of imagination for the sake of an unobstructed view of the 'things themselves'". The next school of interpretation Leonard and Wharton identify is the Romantic school, led by Vendler, Bloom, James Baird, and Joseph Riddel. A third school of Stevens interpretation that sees Stevens as heavily dependent on 20th-century Continental philosophy includes J. Hillis Miller , Thomas J. Hines, and Richard Macksey . A fourth school sees Stevens as fully Husserlian or Heideggerian in approach and tone and

12700-612: The same way most of Cape Cod was: the effective British blockade shut down most fish production and shipping and the town dwindled. It was, by happenstance, the location of the wreck of British warship HMS  Somerset at the Peaked Hill Bars off the Atlantic Coast of Provincetown in 1778. Following the American Revolution, Provincetown grew rapidly as a fishing and whaling center. The population

12827-810: The strong winter seas, they returned to the safety of the harbor, known today as Provincetown Harbor , and set anchor. It was here that the Mayflower Compact was drawn up and signed. The event is memorialized in a sculpture near the Pilgrim Monument. They agreed to settle and build a self-governing community, and came ashore in the West End. Though the Pilgrims chose to settle across the bay in Plymouth , Cape Cod enjoyed an early reputation for its valuable fishing grounds, and for its harbor:

12954-489: The theatrical experiment in Provincetown continued over the winter of 1915–16 and the group planned a second season at Lewis Wharf. The plays were funded in part by a subscription campaign in which Cook described the aim of the group: “to give American playwrights a chance to work out their ideas in freedom." The second season introduced Eugene O’Neill and his play Bound East for Cardiff as well as Trifles by Susan Glaspell . In September 1916 before leaving Massachusetts,

13081-530: The time of European encounter, the area was long settled by the historic Nauset tribe, who had a settlement known as "Meeshawn". They spoke Massachusett , a Southern New England Algonquian language dialect that they shared in common with their closely related neighbors, the Wampanoag . On May 15, 1602, having made landfall from the west and believing it to be an island, Bartholomew Gosnold initially named this area "Shoal Hope". Later that day, after catching

13208-489: The town meeting, act as the legislative branch and approve the budget and amend the town's bylaws, while the popularly elected Board of Selectmen act as the executive branch and hire and oversee the Town Manager, meet regularly to determine policy, and appoint members of other boards and commissions. Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was an American modernist poet. He

13335-599: The town of Truro , and by Provincetown Harbor to the southeast, Cape Cod Bay to the south and west, Massachusetts Bay to the northwest and north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the northeast. The town is 45 miles (72 km) north (by road) from Barnstable , Hyannis, Massachusetts , and 62 miles (100 km) by road to the Sagamore Bridge, which spans the Cape Cod Canal and connects Cape Cod to

13462-515: The town was 91.5% White , 4.0% African American , 0.6% Native American , 0.6% Asian , 1.6% from other races , and 1.7% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 4.8% of the population. The top reported ancestries were Irish (26.7%, up 9.3% from 2000), English (17.4%, up 2.6%), Portuguese (14.6%, down 8.2%), Italian (13.5%, up 3.4%), and German (12.5%, up 3.6%). There were 1,765 households (down 3.9%), out of which 416 (23.6%) had families, 115 (6.5%) had children under

13589-426: The waterfront − especially the waterfront on its southern shore − which offers a naturally deep harbor with easy and safe boat access, plus natural protection from the wind and waves. An additional element of Provincetown's geography tremendously influenced the manner in which the town evolved: the town was physically isolated, being at the hard-to-reach tip of a long, narrow peninsula . The East Harbor, which provided

13716-485: The waterfront, the key to communication and commerce with the outside world. As the town grew, it organically expanded along the harborfront. The main "thoroughfare" was the hard-packed beach, where all commerce and socializing took place. Early deeds refer to a "Town Rode", which was little more than a footpath that ran behind the houses. In 1835, County Commissioners turned that into "Front Street", now known as Commercial Street. "Back Street" ran parallel to Front Street, but

13843-405: The world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens wrote in " The Idea of Order at Key West ": Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of

13970-449: The world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness, nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world; reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of

14097-610: The year in the PAAM galleries. Between 2004 and 2007, PAAM received four Rural Development grants and loans totaling $ 3 million to increase the museum's space, add climate-controlled facilities, renovate a historic sea captain's house (the Hargood House) and cover cost overruns. As the mission of the Rural Development program is "To increase economic opportunity and improve the quality of life for all rural Americans",

14224-487: The year-round vitality of the historic art colony of Provincetown. Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) is a nationally recognized, year-round cultural institution that celebrated its Centennial in 2014. PAAM mounts 35 art exhibitions each year, offers workshops in the fine arts for children, youth, and adults, and hosts an array of programs and events to enrich visitor experience. The PAAM Permanent Collection consists of 3,000 objects, which are displayed throughout

14351-429: The years 2000 through 2010, Provincetown's small year-round population declined 14.3% from 3,431 to 2,942, yet during the summer months, population estimates vary wildly, ranging from 19,000 to 60,000. Census figures are unable to capture these dynamic population fluctuations that are associated with seasonal tourism. Part-time residents, which includes non-resident property owners and seasonal residents, are not counted in

14478-540: The “ Provincetown Playhouse .” The Provincetown operated under the triumvirate for two seasons. But Macgowan allowed that “the Provincetown Players of the great days. . . ended when Jig Cook went to Greece and Eugene O’Neill went to Broadway.” The triumvirate dissolved after two years. The “Third Provincetown” operated from 1925–1929. The theater continued to wrestle with the tension between process and product. The original Provincetown Players were founded on ideals of simplicity, experimentation, and group process. Success, on

14605-430: Was $ 41,488. About 2.1% of families and 15.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 26.0% of those under age 18 and 7.5% of those age 65 or over. Provincetown's ZIP code has the highest concentration of same-sex couple households of any ZIP code in the United States. Data from traditional demographic sources like the U.S. Census, municipal voting rolls and property records may not accurately portray

14732-481: Was bolstered by numerous Portuguese sailors, many of whom were from the Azores , and settled in Provincetown after being hired to work on US ships. By the 1890s, Provincetown was booming and began to develop a resident population of writers and artists, as well as a summer tourist industry. After the 1898 Portland Gale severely damaged the town's fishing industry, members of the town's art community took over many of

14859-529: Was born in Reading, Pennsylvania , educated at Harvard and then New York Law School , and spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut . Stevens's first period begins with the publication of Harmonium (1923), followed by a slightly revised and amended second edition in 1930. It features, among other poems, " The Emperor of Ice-Cream ", " Sunday Morning ", " The Snow Man ", and " Thirteen Ways of Looking at

14986-584: Was born in 1924. She was baptized Episcopalian and later posthumously edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman , who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile may have been used on Weinman's 1916–1945 Mercury dime and the Walking Liberty Half Dollar . In later years, Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and

15113-508: Was erected over the East Harbor in 1854, only to be destroyed by a winter storm and ice two years later. Although the bridge was replaced the following year, any traveler who crossed it still needed to traverse several miles over sand routes, which, together with the backshore route, was occasionally washed out by storms. This made Provincetown very much like an island. Its residents relied almost entirely upon its harbor for its communication, travel, and commerce needs. That changed in 1868, when

15240-625: Was formed to promote gay tourism . Today more than 200 businesses belong to the PBG and Provincetown is perhaps the best-known gay summer resort on the East Coast. The 2010 US Census revealed Provincetown to have the highest rate of same-sex couples in the country, at 163.1 per 1000 households. Since the 1990s, property prices have risen significantly, causing some residents economic hardship. The housing bust of 2005–2012 caused property values in and around town to fall by 10 percent or more in less than

15367-551: Was in the habit of visiting St Patrick's Cathedral for meditative purposes. Stevens debated questions of theodicy during his final weeks with Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer and was eventually converted to Catholicism in April 1955 by Hanley. This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly, who

15494-543: Was kept for the benefit of Plymouth Colony, which began leasing fishing rights to roving fishermen. The collected fees were used to defray the costs of schools and other projects throughout the colony. In 1678, the fishing grounds were opened up to allow the inclusion of fishermen from the Massachusetts Bay Colony . In 1692, a new Royal Charter combined the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies into

15621-562: Was not present at the time of the conversion, according to Hanley. The conversion has been confirmed by both Hanley and a nun present at the time of the conversion and communion. Stevens's obituary in the local newspaper was minimal at the family's request as to the details of his death. The obituary for Stevens that appeared in Poetry magazine was assigned to William Carlos Williams , who felt it suitable to compare Stevens's poetry to Dante 's Vita Nuova and Milton 's Paradise Lost . At

15748-466: Was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital and his condition deteriorated. On August 1, though bedridden, he revived sufficiently to speak some parting words to his daughter before falling asleep after normal visiting hours were over; he was found deceased the next morning, August 2, at 8:30. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery . Mariani indicates that friends of Stevens were aware that throughout his years and many visits to New York City, Stevens

15875-495: Was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized. Mariani relates this: directly in front of Stevens was the very nemesis of his Imagination—the antipoet poet (Hemingway), the poet of extraordinary reality, as Stevens would later call him, which put him in the same category as that other antipoet, William Carlos Williams , except that Hemingway was fifteen years younger and much faster than Williams, and far less friendly. So it began, with Stevens swinging at

16002-552: Was set back from the harbor − today it is known as Bradford Street. "The houses faced the water then; since then some of the houses have been turned around; some of them still have the front door on the shore side. One man, a doctor, who had not lived long in town, proposed that the street be made sixty-four feet wide, but they soon voted down such foolishness as that from foreigners. He tried to compromise on thirty-two feet, but twenty-two feet seemed wide enough for all possible purposes, and twenty-two feet wide it is." Provincetown

16129-448: Was the reduction, you might say, of the world to a few monumental objects. Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium , was published in 1923, and republished in a second edition in 1930. Two more books of his poetry were produced during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn and in 1955 for Collected Poems . For Thomas Grey,

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