'Single emptiness'

— Photo by Lumulus

“It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.”

Wallace Stevens.

― Wallace Stevens, (1879-1955) was a Hartford-based poet, insurance executive and lawyer. He’d walk most days to and from his house, below, to his office at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co. Another big name in the arts who was an insurance executive was Charles Ives (1874-1954), who was raised in Connecticut and became one of America’s greatest composers.

The house of the late Wallace Stevens.