Wallace Stevens and the actual world

389 Pages·1991·21.92 MB·English

by  Filreis

WALLACE STEVENS AND THE ACTUAL WORLD

WALLACE STEVENS
AND THE ACTUAL
WORLD
Alan Filreis
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEWJERSEY
Copyright © 1991 by Princeton Univeisity Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, NewJersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Oxford
All Rights Reserved
Ubrary of Omgress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Filreis, Alan, 1956-
Wallace Stevens and the actual world / Alan Filreis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-06864-X (alk. paper)
1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955—Political and social views.
2. Political poetry, American—History and criticism.
3. Stevens, Wallace, 1879-1955—Knowledge—History.
4. World War, 1939-1945—Literature and the war.
5. War poetry, American—History and criticism.
6. History, Modern, in literature. I. Tide.
PS3537.T4753Z636 1991
81Γ.52—dc20 90-2364
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1 3 5 7 9 I O 8 6 4 2
for Susan

There is going to be a Selected Poems.... The book seemed
rather slight and small to me—and unbelievably irrelevant to
o\rr actual world. It may be that all poetry has seemed like
that at all times and always will. The close approach to reality
has always been the supreme difficulty of any art: the commu­
nication of actuality, as poetry, has been not only impossible,
but has never appeared to be worth while because it loses
identity as the event passes. Nothing in the world is deader
than yesterday's political (or realistic) poetry. Nevertheless
the desire to combine the two things, poetry and reality,
is a constant desire.
—Stevens at the height of the 1952 preddential campaign
I take it that the bearing of the phrase "actual world" is to­
ward something outside us, something objective, whose actual­
ity is somehow an empirical one which tends to look after its
own affairs without consulting us, and even at times resisting
whatever it is in us which we like to call by names like subjec­
tive, private, human as opposed to nonhuman, although even
the human and the subjective lie ready for objective scrutiny
if we change our vantage-point and let them stand opposite
us rather than let them oppose a thing, a world, beyond
them.... Are we prepared to take this stand? Perhaps we are
if we are philosophers of a certain logical stubbornness.
—Allen Tate
Final for him, the acceptance of such prose,
Time's given perfections made to seem like less
Than the need of each generation to be itself,
The need to be actual and as it is.
—Wallace Stevens, "St. Armorer's Churchfrom the Outside"

Contents
List of lllustrati ons xi
List of Abbreviations and Cue Titles xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgments mH
PART ONE: STEVENS'S NATIONAL MOMENT 1
Chapter 1
Playing Checkers under the Maginot Line 3
Chapter 2
FormaKsts under Fire 29
The Soldier's War and the Home Front 29
The New Nationalism 49
Allen Tate's Western Front 63
Poetry and the Actual World 81
Conversations -with Refugees 98
Ode to the Dutch Dead 115
The War-Poem Btisiness 130
PART TWO: STEVENS AT THE END OF IDEOLOGY 149
Chapter 3
Description without a Sense of Place 151
Chapter 4
Cuba Should Be Full of Cuban Things 187
Chapter 5
The Postcard Imagination 207
Chapter 6
Last American Occasions 242
Notes 279
Index 351