Fiction, Politics, and Chocolate Whipped Cream: Wallace Stevens's "Forces, The Will, & The Weather"

I.

In this paper I approach what critics might identify, alternatively, as the political aspects of Wallace Stevens's poetry, or as its lack of an ideological dimension, through "Forces, the Will, & the Weather." This poem has been neglected by Stevens's critics ever since its 1942 publication in Parts of a World. I intend to show that this particular poem casts much more light on those issues than one might expect, given its marginality to the Stevens canon; indeed, I hope to demonstrate that approaching the ideological through a minor rather than a major text is a course particularly suited to the Stevens case. I would note immediately that the political significance of Stevens's 1930s and 1940s work has become, increasingly, a matter for debate. While the generalist orthodox critiques of the past three decades have tended to portray Stevens as a more or less culpably right-wing figure, specialist Stevens scholars have often produced a more ideologically palatable, and even a politically responsible, poet.¹ If one finds racist remarks and guarded praise for Mussolini in the poet's private papers and correspondence, one finds also that he voted the Democrat ticket in the presidential elections of 1900, and even, in a letter of October 1935, his expressed hope that he is "headed left." ² While the Nietzschean affinities of Stevens's "major man" suggest a culpable complicity with fascist mythology and institutional practice, the "Greenest Continent" section of "Owl's Clover" might be read as an indictment of European imperialism in Africa. ³

In short, Stevens's politics remain open to debate because he never gave them full, unequivocal, and public articulation. This reticence has itself been read as politically significant. James Longenbach has praised Stevens's equivocalities and figurative modes as a considered and commendable response to the cultural prevalence of more absolutist discourses; Marjorie Perloff has condemned these same tendencies as escapist. I consider both views presently. What is certainly true is that there is no sustained ideological statement in Stevens's published writings comparable to, say, Pound's propagandist tirades against usurers in "A Visiting Card," or Eliot's attempted legitimization of class hierarchy in Notes towards the Definition of Culture. ⁴ Even in William Carlos Williams's 1930s "Proletarian" portraits and his condemnation of "bought courts" of law we find clearly articulated political sympathies, if not systems. ⁵ We do not find the like in Stevens. His is a case in which questions may be most pertinently asked, not of politics as a recoverable position, but of the general (and I would argue self-conscious) relations between his praxis and the whole ideological sphere. Given this, the points of reference most useful in locating Stevens will be other writers' conceptions, in the 1930s and 40s, of that broad praxis-ideology relation.

"Forces, the Will, & the Weather," as a poem which makes a token reference to politics, only to eschew any serious subject matter, is immediately suggestive because it shows Stevens at his most ideologically evasive. More, it has a unique interest in Stevens's relentlessly foregrounding this evasion, so much so that he becomes, in this text, fully (if negatively) concerned with ideology, with the uneasy relationship between his own poetic work and a notion of "engagement" which the poem successfully makes abstract. On these counts alone, it takes us quickly to the heart of recent debates about the ideological implications of Stevens's work, and the very latency of those implications. We note, additionally, that it was written during a world political crisis, and at a critical point in Stevens's poetic development; the poem belongs to the final phase of Stevens's poetic prior to the central Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. "Forces, the Will, & the Weather" also presents an implicit, subversive gloss on Stevens's most famous lecture, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words." It recalls, too, the early "Anecdote...