"Where / Do I begin and end?": Circular Imagery in the Revolutionary Poetics of Stevens and Yeats

THE "FASCINATION WITH GEOMETRIC FORMS," Miranda B. Hickman observes, "provided many modern writers with a language through which to imagine and articulate their ideals" (xiii).¹ This article investigates the circular imagery in Wallace Stevens's and W. B. Yeats's poetry, arguing that both men's use of the circle as a recurring image can be read as reflective of their opposing political ideologies. Examining Yeats's "The Second Coming," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and A Vision, and Stevens's "Connoisseur of Chaos," "The Sail of Ulysses," "The Man with the Blue Guitar," and "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" reveals Stevens's modification of Yeats's universally subsuming circle into his own pluralistic and localized device.

Both Yeats and Stevens turn to the circle as an ordering structure when faced with the political crises of modernity, including the chaos provoked by Anglo-Irish conflict and two world wars. Joseph Frank explains this shared move by arguing that when "the external world is an incomprehensible chaos" and its artists feel unable to "take pleasure in depicting this world in their art," they might instead turn to "linear-geometric forms" that "have the stability, the harmony" for which they yearn (54). Whether we read Yeats's and Stevens's turn to the circle as part of the psychological response that Frank propounds, or as Stevens's conscious reworking of Yeats's established high modernist move, an exploration of Yeats's and Stevens's use of the circle image reveals a fascinating counterpointed relationship between their respective political beliefs. Caroline Levine instructively laments that literary critics have "typically treated aesthetic and political arrangements as separate," despite the fact that in "Sorting out what goes where, the work of political power often involves enforcing restrictive containers and boundaries. … In other words, politics involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping" (3). Similarly, Yeats's fondness for and Stevens's resistance to the universalizing circular structure mirrors their differing early political ideals.

Yeats offers a universalizing circle that encompasses and structures all of history's chaos and change, replicating his early faith in a single order that governs all beings. His well-documented flirtation with Irish and European fascism in his youth demonstrates his interest in the totalizing, monocratic power structure, similar to that embodied by his all-inclusive circular forms.² The individual will is given up to the collective in the fascist state; the individual is absorbed into the universal circle structure in Yeats's poetry. Stevens, like Yeats, invokes the circle as an ordering structure that acts in opposition to the confusion that he saw in the political conflicts around him, and more broadly in the ceaseless flux of the external world. Crucially, however, while Stevens follows Yeats in seeking in geometric form a redemptive or restorative order, the circles in his poetry behave very differently, being part of "the renovation of the image" that Bonnie Costello cites as the "most significant project of modernist poetry" (169). Although Stevens's circles do attempt to order the fragmented chaos of modern life, they are multiple, imaginative constructions with a more personal reach, rather than the single, universalizing structure that Yeats envisions. Stevens resists the absorption of the individual into the mass structure, and this is reflected in his mistrust of any all-encompassing politics, whether right- or left-wing—what Bart Eeckhout identifies in Stevens's early poetry as a "radical individualism at a time of overbearing collective and monolithic ideologies" (123). Stevens's circular structures consistently embody his rejection of any totalizing political view, vaunting instead the imaginative, personal ordering of existence. Scholars have recurrently read Stevens as politically apathetic or unengaged; while this view has been productively challenged elsewhere, reading Stevens's suspicion of political identification through his circle imagery offers another means of countering these apolitical readings, answering Alan Filreis's incredulous question as to "why a poet as shrewd as Stevens could … have had such a poor sense of how his poetry situated itself politically" (Modernism 6).³ Stevens's circle imagery is in part his way of...