Old John Zeller

The name John Zeller appears several times in Stevens’s family tree. For example, he had an uncle named John Zeller. Also, according to a 1942 letter, John Zeller was Stevens’s maternal grandfather, a man interested in the German Lutheran Church. A letter two years later lists John Zeller as Stevens’s maternal great-grandfather. He was the son of Francis (or Franz) Zeller. This John Zeller was a member of the Trinity Tulpehocken Church, in Tulpehocken, Pennsylvania.
It is the great-grandfather who inspires the poem, “The Bed of Old John Zeller,” a poem which first appeared in Accent in 1944 (Letters 4).
Stevens’s 1942 letter to Mrs. Steinmetz , a genealogist, is a minor marvel of comedy. Nominally, Stevens intends to find his grandfather, but Stevens ruefully acknowledges that the letter is simply a discourse on how little he knows about the man:
I thought it might be useful for you to know how much or how little I know about John Zeller. I cannot think of anyone that would be able to give you the slightest assistance. (Letters 400)
Except for the widow of an older brother, after Stevens’s sister Elizabeth died in early 1943, he had no family of his generation left other than his wife. As a result, Stevens developed an intense interest in genealogy, a fact reflected in his letters of the time. This interest helps explains such poems as “The Bed of Old John Zeller” and “Dutch Graves in Bucks County .”
Old John Zeller also appears in “Two Versions of the Same Poem.”