"… He said he enjoyed Havana very much, but the thing he enjoyed most was the climate, nature, the sky, the natural aspect. Not the city, the tropics. And the air. He said he thought the air in Cuba had something very special about it. And I said, "Are you saying about the air something similar to what is said in The Tempest? It’s a wonderful description of the air in the Bahamas. There’s something soft and sweet about the air." He said, "Yes, and how funny that you should talk about The Tempest," because obviously he was remembering that, too. He always talked with nostalgia about the South and south Florida. And the climate, too. Of course, this is typical of the people who live in the cold country, but to him it was not going to Florida or going to Havana to get away from the cold. It was something sensuous in his appreciation of being in Florida: what he felt in the skin. He said that [there] you live with your senses more than when you live in a cold place. This has to do with his poetry; it was part of his personality."

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From Peter Brazeau, ed. Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1985), 141.