Poetry in (the) place of the Polis: The Question of Politics in Wallace Stevens’s Poems of the Thirties

This essay will re-evaluate Stevens’s “apolitical” poetic stance during the decade as political statement based on pragmatic accommodation to the demands of reality on the poetic imagination. For Stevens, the dialectical tension between art and society is crucial in ensuring that the imagination remains alive to the continual formations of political reality which can never be fully ossified by any one ideological doctrine. Stevens ultimately enunciates a fuller vision of openness, for the Stevensian subject can negotiate politics on his own terms without being completely limited by it.