"Littered with Old Correspondences": Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and the 1930s

JOHN LOWNEY "Littered with Old Correspondences": Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and the 1930s . . . The dump is full Of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box Ftom Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea. Wallace Stevens, "The Man on the Dump" Over the cobbled streets, past the two blocks ofdump and sttaggling grass, past the human dumpheap where the nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat have wrought their wondrous futuristic structures of flat battered tin cans, fruit boxes and gunny sacks, cardboard and mother earth. Tillie Olsen, Ybnnondio: From the Thirties The bight is littered with old correspondences. Elizabeth Bishop, "The Bight" Perhaps the best known post-Waste Land poem about waste by an American poet, Wallace Stevens' "The Man on the Dump" represents the dump as a site of waste and recovery, of imagistic refuse and linguistic transformation, a site in which even the detritus of a collapsed capitalist economy can be converted into poetry. Stevens' dump appears to be an eccentric if not unique site for poetic imagination in histories of modern American poetry; however, by the time that "The Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 2, Summer 1999 Copyright © 1 999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 John Lowney Man on the Dump" was published—1938—the dump had become a conspicuous, contested terrain for literary and visual artists. Cubist, dadaist, and surrealist collage artists had recycled trash before the 1930s, transforming discarded mass-produced objects whose value was otherwise exhausted. During the Great Depression, however, the dump registers more politically—not only as a symbolic site of the decay and disorder of American society, but also as a public site for the reinvention of art and society. Tillie Olsen's lyrical "lament for the lost," Yonnondio , exemplifies such a revolutionary perspective on the "human dumpheap": while she mourns the lost potential of lives stunted by a ruthless capitalist society, she also celebrates the creative resilience of these "nameless FrankLloydWrights of the proletariat." Unlike Marxist exposures of American Depression-era waste such as Olsen's, in which "the janitor's poems / Ofevery day" would register as indictments of the capitalist social order, "The Man on the Dump" manifests Stevens' ambivalence about the political role of poetry in a time of socioeconomic crisis. In its presupposition of the cultural marginality of poetry and its tentative affirmation of a marginal site for poetic production, Stevens' poem nonetheless echoes more politicized literary treatments of waste. More specifically, Stevens' "man on the dump" evokes the emergent figure of the transient "marginal man" variously commemorated in 1930s novels, whether as the embittered solitary male hero in novels like Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs, Jack Conroy's The Disinherited, and Nelson Algren's Somebody in Boots, or within the uprooted families ofJohn Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath or Olsen's Yonnondio.1 During the 1930s, when she was beginning to publish the poems that would be collected in North and South, Elizabeth Bishop followed Stevens' development as a poet closely. Her letters to Marianne Moore demonstrate her ongoing engagement with Stevens' writing at a time when he felt compelled to defend the social value ofpoetry in response to Marxist critics of his writing. Stevens' most explicitly political sequence of poems, "Owl's Clover" (1936), answers Stanley Burnshaw's Marxist critique of his aestheticism. In "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue" Stevens affirms the artist's role in embracing and perpetuating change, but this inevitable process of organic change is more gradual, less predictable , and more responsive to imaginative desire than the apocalyptic vision of revolutionary change he mocks.2 Although sympathetic Elizabeth Bishop, Waüace Stevens, and the 1930s89 with Stevens' defense of art, Bishop's praise for "Owl's Clover" is hardly unqualified. She wrote to Marianne Moore in 1936: I took it as a defense of his own position, and the statue—dear me—I felt, and still cannot help feeling, is art—sometimes the particular creation, sometimes an historical synthesis...