Monhegan

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Monhegan, Maine is a small residential island twelve miles from the mainland, accessible only by ferry. As of the 2000 census there were only 75 inhabitants, and the economy centers around the fishing industry. Monhegan is most notable as an artists colony, which was founded in the mid-nineteenth century, and has been a source of inspiration for such various artists as George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Jamie Wyeth and N.C. Wyeth. Today, the Monhegan Artist's Residency Corporation preserves this heritage by offering low-cost residency programs to selected artists who could otherwise not afford to stay on the island.
Monhegan appears in Stevens' poem "Variations on a Summer Day," a work which is an "exercise in viewing the world" (VIII, 1), which is another Stevens' effort at addressing art and its relation to reality. The Stevens family had visited Monhegan in 1939 and it appears in canto IV: "Star over Monhegan, Atlantic star,/ Lantern without a bearer..." It functions in the poem as a localizing reference to the world of art and ideas, as the creative "will that was" (IV, 7) as well as a place of looking out across the Atlantic to where Europe was engulfed in war.