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Fall 1989 Special Issue: Stevens and Politics Edited by John N The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 13 Number 2 Fall 1989 Special Issue: Stevens and Politics Edited by John N. Serio With an Introduction by A. Walton Litz Contents Introduction —A. Walton Litz . 83 The “Fellowship of Men that Perish”: Wallace Stevens and the First World War —James Longenbach. 85 An Interview with Stanley Burnshaw —Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres . 109 Reflections on Wallace Stevens —Stanley Burnshaw . 122 Figuration and Society in “Owl’s Clover” —Robert Emmett Monroe . 127 Notes Toward the Supreme Soviet: Stevens and Doctrinaire Marxism —Harvey Teres . 150 Stevens in History and Not in History: The Poet and the Second World War —Jacqueline Vaught Brogan . 168 Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace Stevens and H.D. —Melita Schaum . 191 The Politics of Reality, 1948: Wallace Stevens, Delmore Schwartz, and the New Criticism —Paul Bauer . 206 Reviews . 226 News and Comments . 235 Cover by Kathy Jacobi—The Observatory Fountain, Paris The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Potsdam, NY 13676. Subscription rates are $15.00 for individuals ($25.00 for two years) and include membership in The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Rates for institutions are $20.00 per year (add $2.00 foreign). Back issues are available upon request. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor, Clarkson Univer- sity, Potsdam, NY 13676. Manuscripts should be submitted in duplicate and accompanied by a self-addressed envelope, with loose stamps attached. The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR John N. Serio Kathy Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Joseph Duemer Milton J. Bates Jacqueline V. Brogan Faye A. Serio Robert Buttel Frank Doggett Hope Steele Dorothy Emerson George S. Lensing TECHNICAL ASSISTANT A. Walton Litz Roy Harvey Pearce David W. Bray Marjorie Perloff Joseph N. Riddel Melita Schaum Announcing Two Wallace Stevens Society Programs at MLA in Washington, DC I Wednesday, 27 December 1989 7:00-8:30 p.m., Arlington-Alexandria, Sheraton Radishes and Flowers: A Wallace Stevens Feast A choreographed embodiment of nine of Wallace Stevens’ poems Performed by Mary-Averett Seelye and the Kinesis Collaborative Presiding: Edward Kessler, American University Program: “The Place of the Solitaires” “Bantams in Pine-Woods” “A Fish-Scale Sunrise” “Metaphors of a Magnifico” “Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Les Unze Mille Vierges” “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” “The Hand as a Being” “So-And-So Reclining on Her Couch” “The Idea of Order at Key West” II Saturday, 30 December 1989 10:15-11:30 a.m., Dover, Sheraton Teaching Wallace Stevens Presiding: John N. Serio, Clarkson University “Making Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man,” Marie Borroff, Yale University “Containing Chaos,” Robert Pack, Middlebury College “The Ways of Pleasure,” Helen Vendler, Harvard University The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARDRobert Buttel John N. Serio Ellen C. Caldwell David M. Craig Kathy Jacobi George S. Lensing A. Walton Litz Marjorie Perloff © Copyright 1989 by The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Introduction A. WALTON LITZ HE REMARKABLE THING about this issue of The Wallace Stevens Jour- Tnal—other than the unusually high quality of the papers—is that one can- not conceive of its having been formed ten or even five years ago. It represents, to adopt the title of a recent book on Virginia Woolf, one of the major efforts in contemporary literary scholarship: relocating the great modern writers in the “real world” that they inhabited and wrote about. The Stevens of the New Criticism was, depending on the critic’s taste, either a precious aesthete who willfully remained aloof from contemporary culture, or a master of language who drew his greatest strength from this self-absorption. As Jacqueline Brogan points out in a footnote to her paper, this attitude lingers on in the recent Har- per anthology of American literature, where in her introduction to the Stevens section Helen Vendler says that his attempts to “treat social issues, including the war in Ethiopia and World War II . achieved no real stylistic success,” and that Stevens “remained, for the rest of his career, preeminently a poet of the in- ner life.” The myth of Stevens as a totally self-reflexive poet took another form during the “turn to theory” over the past quarter-century. Stevens had a passionate desire for theory, and in many ways anticipated—in terms such as “decrea- tion” and “difference”—the theoretical preoccupations of structuralism and poststructuralism. Thus his poems have provided many of the sacred texts for recent theoretical criticism, the same passages and the same few poems quoted over and over again. What these critics ignored was the counterbalancing im- pulse—and in Stevens’ world there is always a counterbalancing force—to press away from theory in a skeptical search for “that good sense we call civi- lization.” The contributors to this issue are fully aware that the New Critical and post- structuralist attitudes toward Stevens were based on undeniable, and impor- tant, aspects of his life and art: his remoteness in human relationships, his fastidious dislike for doctrinaire arguments, his need to deflect the occasion for a poem into its “cry,” its linguistic equivalent. What they are up to—and I take it to be one of the most exciting developments in current criticism—is an ex- ploration of the “other” Stevens, the poet who lived in the real world and was profoundly affected by the most traumatic public events of his life: two World Wars separated by the Great Depression. Stevens’ poetic life was a long dia- logue between his private and public selves, between imagination and reality, the theoretical and the practical. Studies such as these help us to give equal weight to both terms in the dialogue. The long-range results of this “new historicism” can only be guessed at, but one thing is certain. The canon of Stevens’ major poems will be much larger, and much more diverse. Most of the poems in Collected Poems have been ne- glected in favor of a few that serve the purposes of the New or the theoretical © WSJour 13, 2 (Fall 1989). 83 The Wallace Stevens Journal critic. When all of his poems are taken into account, Stevens may look much less like the supreme poet of poems-about-poetry, and more like—to mention two names that would have been unthinkable a few years ago—Tennyson or Yeats. There is a partial truth in Heidegger’s dictum that “language speaks, not men”; the counter-truth is that all great writers, even those as complex and conflicted as Stevens, live in a particular culture, reflecting it while they reshape it. All criticism is partial, and we should always remember that no as- pect of a writer or a work of art is as important in fact as it appears to be in dis- cussion. Criticism lurches from one extreme to another, since it can never contain all the diverse and rambunctious energies that drive a great poet. We should welcome the present attempts to restore Stevens to the “real world,” while remembering that those other critical traditions were also responding to “something there” in his poetic life. Princeton University 84 The “Fellowship of Men that Perish”: Wallace Stevens and the First World War JAMES LONGENBACH I ALLACE STEVENS AND POLITICS. If this conjunction ever occurs to Wreaders of modern poetry it is usually to wonder if Stevens had any. Pound had lots of them, that’s clear, and everyone knows Auden had them, even when he said that poetry makes nothing happen. At least that statement implies the existence of a world where things do happen. Stevens, after all, was the poet who said that “Poetry is the subject of the poem.”1 But most of his readers know that Stevens could make that statement in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) because this poem followed “Owl’s Clover” (1936), where Stevens took on all manner of social and economic questions raised in the political climate of the thirties. Late in 1936, when Stevens read from “Owl’s Clover” at Harvard, he composed “The Irrational Element in Poetry” to go along with it. Half a gloss on the long poem, half a defense of poetry, this essay has provided a paradigm on which most readings of the shape of Stevens’ career are based: after the lovely world of Harmonium (1923) disintegrated (with the help of Stanley Burnshaw’s Marxist review of Ideas of Order), Stevens worked to leave that world behind and confront, however tentatively, the sorry verities around him. The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the begin- ning of the World War to the present time has been constant and ex- treme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion. For a long time before the war nothing was more common. In those days the sea was full of yachts and the yachts were full of millionaires. It was a time when only maniacs had disturbing things to say. The period was like a stage-setting that since then has been taken down and trucked away. It had been taken down by the end of the war, even though it took ten years of struggle with the consequences of the peace to bring about a realization of that fact. People said that if the war continued it would end civilization, just as they say now that another such war will end civilization. It is one thing to talk about the end of civilization and another to feel that the thing is not merely possible but measurably probable.
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