A South Shaftsbury Poet Confronting Progress

by Cindy Ellen Hill

Candace Thurber was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1883, in a household of modest means; according to the Smith College library archives, which houses most of her papers, Candace’s mother supported the family by taking in boarders. 

Candace graduated from the Packard Collegiate Institute, which was founded as the Brooklyn Female Academy in the mid-19th century, and went on to get a BA from Smith College in 1904, and then her M.A. from Columbia University. After completing her education she taught English in a private school and co-owned a children’s bookstore in New York City. 

In 1912, so at age 29 (late in life by the standards of the time) she married Thomas Kennedy Stevenson. They had one daughter, Caroline. During her adult years Candace Stevenson lived and taught briefly in Missouri, spent much time in New York City, and eventually settled with her husband in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, where they had been spending summers for many years. 

Candace’s poems reflect both the drastic changes in technology and mechanical and industrial progress which occurred in her lifetime, and the differences between urban and city life. In a poem called “Line Drawing,” she contrasted her “winter life” lived in “sharp patterns”

          the vertical lift of elevators,
          long horizontals of streets,
          lozenged, rectangular.

with Vermont’s “slow roll of hills”

          the curving
          of small roads going nowhere,
          ending in a pin point.
          There is no immediacy.
          There are no nameless.

In the city, her poems report, she was surrounded by people she new only by physical relation – a man whose typewriter she hears tapping at three a.m., a woman in the building who died of a heart attack – but not by name or character or family. In Vermont, with fewer neighbors, she knows each one and their backstory and all their relatives. She speaks of the pressure of the urban anonymity, and the supportive nature of rural community. 

Yet even at her South Shaftsbury home, progress intrudes somewhat violently on the landscape. Her poem Road Scraper addresses the new mechanical means of surfacing the area’s dirt roads, while standing allegorically as the whole of progress:

Road Scraper

Progress came up my road.
I am afraid.
I hate the horrid thing
With its steel blade,
Tearing up grass and roots,
Young maple trees,
The tall fern’s tender shoots—
Shall I appease
This god who rides serene
Bent on destruction of this quiet scene,
Or shall I fight him—
Say, “You shall not pass.
These are my weeds.
This widow’s peak of grass
where the drive turns
is mine.” ...
He went, but I knew then,
Certain as sunrise,
He would come again. 

Many of Candace’s poems appeared on the editorial page of the New York Times, a notable achievement. Her only published collection of poetry, First the Blade, appeared 1952, published by E.P. Dutton and Company. 

The N.Y. Times Book gave the book a modest review in 1953, though it is important not to underestimate the prestige of securing any N.Y.Times book review, at that time or today. The Times reviewer assessed her book thusly:

Indowed with the cool but delighting eye of an amateur painter, Candace Thurber Stevenson is at her best in this first volume of poems when she gives us sharp impressions of Vermont landscapes, the look of barns and Autumn weather. It is only when she attempts to draw lessons from her landscapes that she often comes up with platitudes. At other times, when she attempts to deepen her domestic verse by taking larger attitudes toward her world her language fails to support her vision. Again, in her many poems about animals, Mrs. Stevenson unfortunately tries to endow her subjects with human characteristics, and this leads her into trouble. For example, she begins a poem about cows: “A glossy harem lying at their ease."

Here is the poem the N.Y.Times disdained, and it is interesting to consider whether it might be received differently in Vermont, where we hold cows in higher esteem than they do in Manhattan:

Cows

A glossy harem lying at their ease,
Guernsey and Jersey, punctuated by
black and white Holsteins, the cows
ruminate in consummate boredom
the cud of scientifically green pastures.
A few roving spirits head through the fence,
investigate the garden, taking shaggy mouthfuls
of delphinium, until the woman with the stick
chases them away. In late afternoon
collies barking at their heels
sent them frisking to the barn
where they encounter rigors of the machine age—
the gleaming milker.
But cows will never capitulate entirely.
Only the hard brown hand can strip
the last milk from their udders
into the foaming pail.

We can see in these examples that Candace Stevenson embraces free verse, which had come to prominence in the first half of the 20th century, dovetailing the modern poetry style with the landscape-based narrative subject matter which dominates the canon of New England poetry. However, she did not abandon classical forms entirely, as this sonnet with its timeless reminder of mankind’s place in the universe aptly demonstrates:

Crops

Oats, peas, beans and barley, rye,
Alfalfa, timothy, hay and clover,
Side by side the meadows lie
On the knees of earth in a shaggy cover.
Sowed by iron and gasoline, 
Oil and the cunning and brown of man,
They’re reaped again in a strange machine
While another winnows the wheat from bran.
Though the rick is gone and the bale takes over,
As the combine pushes away the cart
Heavy with hay and the ripened clover,
Man had better not think he’s smart,
For his brow still sweats and his skin is leather,
And God still holds the whip hand – weather.

Candace taught at Breadloaf in 1957, and so crossed paths there with Robert Frost, who was at Breadloaf for 42 summers. She also taught at the Antioch Writers Conference in 1958. She died at her home in South Shaftsbury on July 30, 1968 at the age of 85.

---