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24 Legal Stud. F. 481 (2000)
Imagination and Insurance: Wallace Stevens and Benjamin Lee Whorf at the Hartford

handle is hein.journals/lstf24 and id is 489 raw text is: IMAGINATION AND INSURANCE: WALLACE STEVENS AND BENJAMIN LEE WHORF AT THE HARTFORD DAVID LAVERY* Ives: Mr. Stevens, nothing is empty. I'm an insurance man, Mr. Stevens. I guarantee the future. I let a man sleep nights because he knows that his family is protected from the random cruelties of this world. Can you call that empty? Stevens: Insurance? Did you say you were an insurance man? -Stuart Flack, American Life and Casualty1 From 1918 to 1941 the main office of the Hartford Insurance Company on Asylum Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, a solemn affair of granite, with a portico resting on five of the grimmest possible columns,2 housed two most unusual employees. Upstairs in a big corner office, a Harvard graduate, bond-surety lawyer who became a vice- president of the company (in 1934), and, on the side, wrote poetry. Downstairs, in the fire insurance division, a fire prevention specialist, an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was to become a well-known linguist. There is no clear evidence they knew each other. A letter to Whorf was mistakenly addressed to the poet but eventually reached the linguist on the first floor. If they became aware ofeach other's work, prior to the fire-prevention linguist's untimely death in 1941, I have been unable to determine. The bond- surety poet was thirty-nine years old when the fire prevention-linguist, eighteen years his junior, joined the company. He would outlive him by fourteen years. When Stevens was still very young, a Parisian stockbroker fled business and family to pursue his own creative vocation in the South Seas. A contemporary of both the poet and the linguist, an American business man, feigned a nervous breakdown and ran away from a successful career to become a writer, eventually ending up in Paris as a member of Gertrude Stein's coterie. Wallace Stevens and Benjamin * Professor of English, Middle Tennessee State University. For a web version of this essay, see: http:J/www.mtsu.edu/-dlavery/imagins.htm I Stuart Flack, American Life and Casualty, <http:./www.mtsu.edu/-dlavery/ Stevenslamlife.htm> (visited July 15, 2000). 2 Holly Stevens (ed.), LErERs OF WALLACE STEvENs 283 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996) (1966).

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