talk of such praise and admiration, what first 

caught my fancy was that he spent summers

 
at Praia da Vitória (not in, mind you, but at,

 
for I had no idea what P. da. V. signified, 

never having been there and knowing Terceira 

then only from having landed at Lajes decades 

earlier on my way to Lisbon. I heard that he 

fancied the viola and thus imagined him sitting 

cross-legged on the shore, looking out at endless 

waves, and serenading the unseen (except to an 

inner eye) mermaids of that endless sea. Then 

practicality barged in and I thought, well how 

long could he do that? Imagine, a whole summer 

of singing and playing to a silent choir of creatures 

one could not entice into a windy café for a drink.

June 23, 2013

George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).