Leyden

City in the western part of The Netherlands; where many early pilgrims lived before sailing to America. Leyden is home to the University of Leyden, the oldest university in The Netherlands. The city is on the Old Rhine and is only about 12 miles form The Hague. Many notable painters and physicists have resided in Leidon. Its sister cities include Oxford, UK; Juigalpa, Nicaragua; Krefield, Germany; Torun, Poland; and Buffalo City, South Africa. The city was once a fortress, and this is still seen in its architecture today. During World War II, the city was extensively bombed by the Allies, with much of the surrounding area completely destroyed. 
==Stevens’s Poems:==
“Examination of the Hero in a Time of War,” line 2: “Roma ni Avignon ni Leyden,”
 and line 10-11: “Peace in a time of peace, said Leyden/ Was always the other mind” 
Harold Bloom declares the poem one of Stevens’s more extreme failures, even though Stevens himself claimed it a success and one of his favorites. Bloom seems to find solace, though, since “at least the poem does seem to have clered the ground for Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, written shortly after it” (Bloom 160). While Bloom finds “Examination of the Hero” to be using a trope of war, rather than the in depth consideration of reality’s often violent nature and how this nature affects the imagination and the poet. 
==References:==
*Leidon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden
*Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. New York: Cornell UP, 1980. Google Books. Web.