'Notes Torwards A Supreme Fiction'
May 29, 2024 6:14 PM Subscribe
"In the life of a poet, of course, there is no Election Day to distinguish the visionaries from the also-rans. So Stevens’s response, when it came, trickled down in dribs and drabs. Scholars argue over this: some see him as returning, defensively, to conservatism, particularly since in a 1940 letter he declared that “Communism is just the new romanticism,” and referred to “my rightism.”"
'What Mitt Romney Might Learn From Wallace Stevens' [archive link]
what an excellent essay. truly to the grit.
QFT:
Think of Utopia as just another word for the ideal America—the imagined one of election seasons that is prosperous, righteous, and always good—and suddenly Stevens is not so different from the person who gives a stump speech. Stevens believed that the best in the world (which he called “poetry”) came forward when we allowed the imagination to roam free. But ever the realist, he saw that the shore—a firm, real, substantial shore—was a place it continually “returned” to to rejuvenate itself. And even within the bounds of his comfortable, corporate, suburban existence he found his way to believing that others deserved to have something to stand on, too. If only we could get every member of such a class to that same place.
posted by chavenet at 1:39 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]
QFT:
Think of Utopia as just another word for the ideal America—the imagined one of election seasons that is prosperous, righteous, and always good—and suddenly Stevens is not so different from the person who gives a stump speech. Stevens believed that the best in the world (which he called “poetry”) came forward when we allowed the imagination to roam free. But ever the realist, he saw that the shore—a firm, real, substantial shore—was a place it continually “returned” to to rejuvenate itself. And even within the bounds of his comfortable, corporate, suburban existence he found his way to believing that others deserved to have something to stand on, too. If only we could get every member of such a class to that same place.
posted by chavenet at 1:39 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]
I imagine him with a hand in a pocket of his eternal black suit and rubbing a silver dime between the tips of thick fingers and thinking why did I marry this woman and then pushing down into the other pocket to adjust himself and remember.
posted by pracowity at 3:20 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 3:20 AM on May 30 [4 favorites]
"...nobody has yet imagined a plausible Wallace Stevens." --Hugh Kenner
posted by graywyvern at 8:07 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]
posted by graywyvern at 8:07 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]
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