Hartford is a city rich in literary history; its buildings stand not only as architectural achievements in their own right, but as testaments revisited and renewed in complementary poems and prose in Of Hartford in Many Lights. We learn in the introduction that the editors chose “104 significant buildings and poets [forty four of them] made choices . . . from this list.”
Among the public buildings, and the poetic pairings, the homes of several of America’s most prominent literary figures are featured, such as the residence of Mark Twain, a twenty-five-room mansion whose occupants are brought to life in Ginny Lowe Connors’s “The Mark Twain House.” The home remains adjacent to a museum-memorial more impressive than any other American fictionist, and across a wide lawn is the home of his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a like-minded writer of social justice issues. Even today, the capital city of Connecticut is home to an abundance of writers and poets.
Yet among all the literary riches, there is the home occupied for nearly forty years by Wallace Stevens. As Tom Condon wrote in his preface, “The title ‘Of Hartford in Many Lights’ is a play on Stevens’s poem, ‘Of Hartford in a Purple Light.’ The book has a poem called ‘Of Stevens and the Hartford in Morning Light’ by Richard Deming which describes Stevens’s practice of walking to work from his home on Westerly Terrace to The Hartford.”
The hardest thing to imagine is him, the poet
of poets somewhere deep in that grand building . . . .
to become some doubled self, some voice
caught between incantation and indemnity
Stevens’s home is visited in Susan Howe’s “from 118 Westerly Terrace,” and paired with the Barone’s description, “The Wallace Stevens House,” as Chase Twichell’s poem “Church Ghosts” commemorates Asylum Hill Congregational Church where her great-grandfather was its pastor, and described in prose in the “The Structures” section of the book that defines the historic buildings in prose images. The Wadsworth Atheneum visited so often by Stevens, is offered as a poetic tour by Sally Van Doren in “A Visit to the Wadsworth” : “a many-sided mausoleum / where paintings and sculptures / are preserved for the ages.”
The arts, if made for mourning, or celebration, humor or condemnation, so often attempt to preserve events, people, places, perceptions—to memorialize them—and this is the case with Of Hartford in Many Lights as well. Of their unique anthology, the editors claim it is “a 2024-time capsule for the Capital City of Connecticut—Hartford.” This may be true, but it is also true that this book is a building of light, and is the manifestation of the epigraph chosen for the volume from Wallace Stevens’s “Architecture” : “Let us build the building of light.” The Barones have achieved this, and they are, no less, to Hartford what Atget was to Paris.
Michael Gessner has authored 14 books of poetry and prose. A finalist in “Discovery”/The Nation, The Pablo Neruda Award, and the James Hearst Prize, (North American Review,) his prose and poetry have been included in The American Journal of Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, American Literary Review, Calliope, Citta Immaginaria (Rome,) The French Literary Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Kenyon Review, Nimrod, North American Review, Oxford Review (UK), Pacific Review, Rue des Beaux-Arts (Paris,) Sycamore Review, Verse Daily, The Yale Journal of Humanities and others.