"Less Neatly Measured Common-Places": Stevens' Wartime Poetics

Introduction

"I make no reference in this letter to the war," Wallace Stevens writes in 1940. "It goes without saying that our minds are full of it" (L 356). Wartime, as it is coextensive with the everyday, pervades the mindset and activities of civilians. It is a mediated experience of war, as has recently been argued by Judith Butler, Mary Favret, and others.¹ It is a condition rather than an event, so that it "translates war from the realm of sublime event to an underlying situation or condition of modernity" (Favret 38). The force of war thus exceeds the bounds of the battlefront not only as civilians are made targets, but also as it makes wartime the quotidian.

Stevens' note that he is not mentioning the war in his letter is an instance of paralipsis, the rhetorical figure by which a speaker ironically mentions a subject by pretending to pass over it. It indicates the wariness of a writer attempting to encompass tremendous concepts in slender words. Stevens' paralipsis can be understood as a deflation of "the grandiloquence of heroism," which war exemplifies, as Jean-Luc Nancy has argued (Chronicles 42).² Stevens demonstrates his resistance to public language at a time when the phrase "wartime" itself had become so ordinary as to be banal (Filreis, "Home" 109, 120).³ On the home front during World War II, citizens were subordinate to the communalizing demands of the war effort and the intense domestic regulation that the state implemented. The United States government made use of visual representations that explicated this relation, such as pie charts or gauges measuring progress toward collections of scrap metal (Duis 37). Mass media such as the radio and the newspaper contributed to making the average person feel that he or she belonged to a civilian army and that the war was "everybody's war," as one schoolteacher wrote in 1943 (Parry 568). Forceful sirens announcing civil defense drills were a "loud manifestation" of the attempt to "enlist" citizens (Duis 37).

Stevens, watching the invasion of Poland occur from across the Atlantic, asks the crucial question of how to bridge distance empathetically and activate relation between near and far, between singular and plural: "What had this star to do with the world it lit," he wonders in "Martial Cadenza," "With the blank skies over England, over France / And above the German camps?" (CPP 217). The issue becomes one of how the world, in the form of facts that are known but not experienced, enters the poem. In "Esthétique du Mal," written and published in 1944, the familiar Stevensian figure of the man at his daily business of reading and writing becomes freighted with contemporary political significance as the man is now "writing letters home" from Naples and "reading paragraphs / On the sublime" while Vesuvius erupts and the Allies take the Neapolitan region (CPP 277). The sublimity of natural disaster and war mingle with the urban quotidian.

Stevens keenly followed the political developments in Europe, and his texts of the time demonstrate as much. However, critics have debated the political engagement of the poems he wrote during the 1930s and 1940s, at times indicating the very same textual evidence to illustrate either his concern with current events or his retreat into the "country of metaphor," as Marjorie Perloff terms it (42). Some scholars, such as Alan Filreis and James Longenbach, have drawn on archival research to argue for Stevens' political engagement.⁴ In recent decades, Milton J. Bates, Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, Eleanor Cook, Angus Cleghorn, and Stefan Holander, among others, have situated Stevens' use of rhetoric historically, attending to the formal properties of his poems while paying attention to their sociopolitical context in a way that I wish to expand here.⁵ I will argue that while Stevens may not have subscribed to the Thirties' belief in literature as a means to effect social change, responding to world events did present an active problem for his wartime writing—a problem we must understand in relation to the news of war that he received through the daily newspaper. The aim of this essay...