Mrs. Anderson

Mrs. Anderson is a character who makes a brief appearance in "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating":
"Mrs. Anderson's Swedish baby/ Might well have been German or Spanish...." (9-10).
==Who Is Mrs. Anderson?==
Impossible to say. She is probably purely invented, although Stevens does mention a Miss Anderson in an unparse-able aside in one of his letters to Harriett Monroe (Letters 215).
==What is Mrs. Anderson Doing in this Poem?==
Mrs. Anderson and her baby offer a human take on the endlessly repetitive round of birth and death that characterizes all being. Richard Allen Blessing, in Wallace Stevens' Whole Harmonium, suggests that they may also provide a kind of implicit commentary on the importance of particulars within the human sphere--particulars tragically overlooked when, as the narrator does in this poem, one takes only the broad view of human life. The key to Blessing's argument is the fact that, in the 1930s, especially in Europe, one's race and nationality had profound consequences. These consequences are occluded by the narrator who, his ear attuned to only the great patters and movements of life, has completely missed the essential counterpoint to his own pontification.