I first met Mr. Stevens in Philadelphia in 1928. We had a contractor who we were bonding to the Board of Education, guaranteeing the performance of his contract. The fellow went broke, and we had to contact the home office [of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s Insurance Department in New York] to let them know we were in trouble with this man. Mr. Stevens got on the phone and told the manager that it was important enough that he felt he ought to come down to Philadelphia. …

"I didn’t know him as anything but a lawyer and a business executive [in 1931, when Taylor, an experienced surety lawyer, began working in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity’s Insurance Department in New York] …

"… 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.

"The next morning we were at breakfast at the Yale Club. Randall was across the table, and I was somehow next to Stevens, We were talking generally, and I said something about seeing Ninotchka in New York with Randall. Stevens came alive immediately. "Garbo!" he said. He talked about always wishing he could meet her and how beautiful she was, that she really was his favorite actress in the world. There was a pause.

Every morning, like clockwork, he used to walk down Terry Road about nine o’clock, just about the time I was standing by my kitchen sink. I’d always get a thrill. I the afternoon, he’d walk back, this very slow stride of his. Usually, if it was summer or good weather, I’d be outdoors with some of the neighbors’ children. I’d make them stop and look at him, and I’d say, "I want you to remember this is a great poet."

[After introducing Stevens at a 1952 reading at Harvard, my wife and I] drove him to his hotel in our ‘36 Ford, which was very uncomfortable for him. We said we hoped he would come and see us some time. "I won’t, but you’re very kind to invite me." There was no severity in that at all. He was just being honest. In the same way, during that day he spoke, not with any animus but with a certain firmness, of two classes of people: those who bother you with letters and those who do not.

If the natural activity of the mind is to make unreal representations, these are still representations of the material world. "The clouds preceded us / There was a muddy centre before we breathed"; matter is prior to mind and in some sense determines it.

"This final movement of the poem, in contrast to the stasis of its beginning, is bridged by a passage at the very middle of the poem:

    nor cloudy palm

Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured

As April’s green endured; or will endure

Like her remembrance of wakened birds,

Or her desire for June and evening, tipped

By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.

Stevens's search for a rhetoric more than fiction and a nature less than an external fate begins with "Sunday Morning" and its realignment of the Emersonian and romantic dualities. The poem mourns at once the loss of Christian and romantic mythologies, which offer versions of the same fusion of temporal and eternal realities. "Sunday Morning" does not judge religion to be a fiction and Christ to be but a man in order to exhort us to a species of nature worship. For Stevens portrays the world of sense impressions as a fantastic play of surfaces.

Harmonium offered readers a very different version of "Sunday Morning" from the one they had seen in Poetry in 1915. In Poetry, the fifth and final stanza, now recognized as the seventh stanza, had expressed the exalted paganism of "a ring of men" chanting "Their boisterous devotion to the sun." This ecstasy of human physical feeling, the only divinity of humankind, would then be recreated and sustained by echo throughout the environment. In Harmonium, however, this ringing affirmation of human and natural coexistence was no longer the poem's final emphasis.