Poets and politicians are thought to have different temperaments, but it is possible that in another life Wallace Stevens could have traded professions. Just like a certain businessman-turned-candidate for President, Stevens was the kind of person who wore a three-piece suit every day, even on weekends, even on the long, reflective walks he took to compose his poems. People who saw him going along the country roads near Hartford, if they noticed him at all, must have thought, “There goes a boring rich man.” And in a way, they were right. Often the first thing you learn about Stevens when you study him in school is that he was an executive at the Hartford Insurance Company. He turned down the Charles Eliot Norton professorship of poetry at Harvard late in his life in order to remain the insurance company’s vice-president, a title he still held on the day he died, in 1955. He married one woman and remained married to her even when the marriage turned out to be a mistake. He had no affairs that scholars know of. He was a solid, good early-century man, a scion of business, and, according to his biographers, is best described politically as a Republican with a strong admiration for Taft.
Such a tame biography is not what one expects from an artist of Stevens’s caliber. Conservative politics are one thing, an ordinary life quite another. Artists, at least in the way we imagine them, thrive on drama and risk. Keats had his wasting disease and lover on the other side of a thin, shared wall; Pound his fascist radio broadcasts and insanity pleas for charges of treason; Plath her cheating Yorkshireman and glasses of milk left in the children’s room. Stevens’s existence was so prosaic that he may seem to us more aligned with prose than poetry—and legalese at that. “People suppose, since there is so much interest in selling Fuller brushes or sorting postcards in a post office,” he once offered, perhaps generously, “that the same thing must be true of handling fidelity and surety claims.” In fact, no: “You sign a lot of drafts. You see surprisingly few people.” The days are, frequently, the same.
That suited Stevens fine because, again, like a certain former governor of Massachusetts, he was a man who took comfort in small manifestations of order. “One of the first things I do when I get home at night is to make people take things off the radiator tops,” he once explained to a publisher. Stevens could easily have been the kind of man who planned the bathroom breaks on his road trips down to the minute. Some people just want an even keel in the rhythm of their lives. In fact, most of us do.
When Stevens was promoted to his vice-presidency, in 1934, the conflict between his security in life and the flavor of his poetry was coming to a head. He was now earning about $20,000 a year, which would be a little under $350,000 today. As a result he was, as some might and in fact did say, more than a little removed from the daily concerns of the populace. In the mid-nineteen-thirties, poets were being called to arms to comment on the sufferings of the ordinary working man. Patrician remove was going out of style.
As a matter of aesthetics, too, the popular mode did not come naturally to Stevens. He was never sure whether poets should declaim their political opinions, and was philosophically opposed to the idea on some level. His poetry is always thought of as “difficult” precisely because Stevens believed he had to get far away from the world itself in order to get at the truth. “Facts are like flies in a room,” he once wrote to his wife. “They buzz and buzz and bother.”
His letters from the early nineteen-thirties contain hints that the truth was creeping into the margins of his life anyway. He knew of the disparity between his situation and that of his fellows: “People actually go to bed leaving lights burning all over the house in order to fool the bums,” he wrote in a letter to a business acquaintance. He was corresponding prolifically with a strange figure named Ronald Lane Latimer, the editor and sole proprietor of a small leftist publishing house called Alcestis Press. Latimer was a man so fond of pseudonyms and personal-mystery skullduggery that most of the poets he corresponded with knew him by different names. (Pound knew Latimer by his real name, James Leippert.) The scholar Alan Filreis has speculated that Stevens probably became entangled with Latimer not out of political sympathy but because publishers in the Depression were unwilling to take on the risk of a poetry trade paperback. But Latimer was interested in doing a small edition of Stevens’s unpublished work, and Stevens replied to Latimer’s offer that he would like nothing more.
A limited-edition run of “Ideas of Order,” Stevens’s second book of poems, thus appeared in 1935. It contained a poem that appears on most modern-poetry syllabi today, “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The last stanza is often cited as a sort of thesis statement for Stevens’s idea that the “order” of poetry is the best way to articulate meaning in a fractured, chaotic world:
But not everyone found Stevens’s new sound so keen. One critic to whom Latimer sent a copy of “Ideas of Order” for review was Stanley Burnshaw, of the Communist Party USA’s New Masses. Though he’d never expressed any particular sympathies for leftism before, Stevens told Latimer that “merely finding myself in that milieu was an extraordinarily stimulating thing.” And yet Burnshaw was not a fan of the book, and took it as an occasion to write a takedown of Stevens’s thinking generally. After praising Stevens’s first book, “Harmonium,” from 1923, for its humor and phrasing, Burnshaw added that, “It is the kind of verse that people concerned with the murderous world collapse can hardly swallow today except in tiny doses.” Yet the incursion of social consciousness into “Ideas of Order” did little more, Burnshaw wrote, than turn Stevens’s “harmonious cosmos” into one “screeching with confusion.” He had a point: the text fused calls for collectivism with contempt for “peanut people.”
For some reason Burnshaw’s disapproval nettled Stevens. He was so irked, in fact, that within a year he’d composed a new section of his long poem titled “Owl’s Clover.” One of its poems is called “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue,” in which the figure of Burnshaw stands for the appeal of politics and the Statue for art. The overall theme that emerges is that “All things destroy themselves or are destroyed.” That piece has its virtues, but as Harold Bloom once put it, “much is left unrepressed … until the poem collapses in a hysteria of bad wit.” Indeed, some lines are downright ugly:
Stevens’s letters on the subject are similarly incoherent and defensive. “I hope I am headed left,” he wrote to Latimer, “but there are lefts and lefts, and certainly I am not headed for the ghastly left of Masses. The rich man and the comfortable man of the imagination of people like Mr. Burnshaw are not nearly so rich or so comfortable as he believes them to be. And, what is more, his poor men are not nearly so poor…. Masses is just one more wailing place and the whole left nowadays is a mob of wailers.”
Whatever its failings, the Masses piece had clearly had its intended effect; if “Owl’s Clover” proved nothing else it was that Stevens was shaken. Some image of himself had been disturbed, and it is not hard to picture him, at 10 P.M. on a Monday, sitting up with hair mussed and contemplating future modes of his defense.
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.”
But there are subtler signals in Stevens’s work of the development of his political ideals. When Franklin D. Roosevelt instituted Social Security in 1935, many of Stevens’ co-workers were appalled. They saw it as nothing short of the end of the insurance industry. But Stevens himself supported it. As he wrote to his colleagues two years later in their company journal, the truth was that “insurance for all” was not the same as “insurance for everything.” There would still be many places for a private insurance industry to fill. In fact, the provision of a guaranteed income, Stevens argued, would allow the populace to imagine all the other kinds of insurance they might need, given that humanity’s “prime instinct is to go on indefinitely like the wax flowers on the mantelpiece.” It does hold a certain logic: the satisfaction of one need only frees up our thoughts to find and satiate another.
This embedded idea, that there was something liberating in the elimination of risk, led Stevens to write approvingly in that company journal of social insurance in Italy, Germany, and England. For Stevens, these policies embodied the ideal that in order to imagine the better world, you needed to have some semblance of a foothold. Perhaps this was not so surprising stance for him to take. The interdependence of imagination and reality is one of Stevens’s great themes, one that undergirds his long (and dazzling) poem of 1937, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”:
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.
Photograph by Walter Sanders/Time & Life/Getty.
