“The Emperor of Ice-Cream” does not immediately appear to be set in an specific geographic locale, but a few key details have led scholars to situate the poem in Key West, Florida, a frequent vacation spot for Stevens throughout his life. We can gain illuminating background by considering this poem in the context of Stevens’ travels, and his habit of writing poems strongly grounded in a specific place.
Poet Elizabeth Bishop, and other critics, have taken the poem’s cigar roller and ice cream as evidence of a setting in Key West, where Cuban cigars are rolled in factories, and ice cream is a common festive component of funerals and wakes, especially in the Black community, as a reprieve from the heat. Stevens first traveled to Key West in 1922, the year he composed “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” This poem, and several others in Harmonium, show the strong first impressions that Florida made on him: he wrote in a letter to his wife, “the place is a paradise…beyond what you have ever seen.”
In contrast with his Connecticut home, the exotic, otherworldly feeling of Florida seemed to captivate Stevens, who never traveled outside North America in his life. Florida appears as lush and luxurious in other poems from Harmonium, like “Nomad Exquisite,” and as a place naturally charged with sexual lust in “O Florida, Venereal Soil.” The air of sexual indulgence that permeates “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” which seems arbitrary at first, undoubtedly stemmed from the similar aura that Stevens perceived Florida as having. The racial foreignness of the Black and Cuban people he saw in Key West also added to Stevens’ tone of exoticism: his well-documented racism likely led him to see something primitive, elemental, and simple in their ways, which was convenient for the poem’s stated goal of stripping life down to its basic energies.
Stevens often composed his poems while walking around town, when he felt he could think most clearly. This habit helped create his characteristic style of poems that are often highly abstract journeys of thought, while also being grounded in a specific setting. Many contemporary Modernists placed equal importance on geography, but there were essentially two camps. One were the expatriate poets, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who fled America to pursue grand cities and creative stimulation in Europe. Stevens was of the other camp, whose poems were decidedly American, along with William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and others. Williams rigorously depicted urban New Jersey, and like Stevens had a white-collar profession as a doctor, and Frost wrote pastoral, meditative pieces based on his experience in rural New England. Stevens wrote many poems set in his home of Connecticut—his late poem “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” has the poet on a rambling train of thought while strolling through the city—but found his foreign, exotic inspiration at the southern tip of the country, in Florida.
