Broadcasting Modernism

14. Updating Baudelaire for the Radio Age: The Refractive Poetics of “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”

257 c h a p t e r 1 4 Updating Baudelaire for the Radio Age The Refractive Poetics of “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” J. Stan Barrett AnxietyaboutaudiencepreoccupiedWallaceStevensduringthecomposition of Ideas of Order and affected his use of abstraction in his poetry throughout the 1930s. The flood of cultural production for which the 1930s is well known made Stevens defensive about poetry’s place amid America’s vast array of cultural offerings. In a letter Stevens wrote to Ronald Latimer in 1935 about reprinting Ideas of Order in a popular edition, Stevens agrees to Latimer’s proposal without enthusiasm, stating flatly that “selling poetry now-a-days must be very much like selling lemonade to a crowd of drunks” (Letters 284). His concerns about poetry’s diminished audience, somewhat tempered by his firm belief that poetry is properly intended for the social elite, were further complicated by his sustained interest in settling for himself the nature of the poet’s social function. Pursuing this line of inquiry, almost obligatory for American poets writing during the Great Depression, Stevens composed several poems—“Farewell to Florida,” “Sailing after Lunch,” “The American Sublime,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz,” and “Mozart, 1935”—whose images of crowds focus Stevens’s thinking about a poetry uncompromised by pressures he imagined as the public’s demands upon the artist. These poems inevitably failed to assuage Stevens’s anxiety or resolve his complex and contradictory aspirations for poetry, and instead of any remedy, what emerges from them is a clear picture of the increasingly powerful compulsion Stevens felt to hold his audiences at bay.1 In Ideas of Order abstraction becomes Stevens’s mechanism for coping with his desire to be socially engaged while satisfying a much stronger desire to distance his own thinking from the public’s thoughts, which Stevens strongly associated with radio. Deliberately emptying his language of content , Stevens arranges poems like “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating” as screens to block or diffuse the associations of his poetic language with the ideas and discourses continuously broadcast over America’s airwaves. His poems take up the work of restoring the intersubjective distance between writer and reader that he believed radio had helped to collapse. “A Spirit Storming in Blank Walls”: Updating Baudelaire By the mid-1930s Stevens felt that one no longer needed to leave the house in order to jostle against the crowd, though by that time he had had at least a decade to grow accustomed to radio. Explaining to Louis Untermeyer in January 1925 why he had recently been too preoccupied to correspond, he remarks, “There are a great many things cutting in nowadays. There is a baby and a radio, and I am expecting to go to Florida in a week or so” (Letters 244). Stevens bought his first radio, which entered his home with a disruptive force commensurate with the arrival of his daughter, at the beginning of America’s radio craze, even before the first nationwide broadcasting system had become operational. Nevertheless, in both “The Irrational Elements of Poetry” and “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Stevens’s remarks show that he still experienced radio as alien and intrusive, and he describes feeling besieged by radio’s continuous talk about world events. In “The Irrational Element of Poetry,” a speech he delivered at Harvard in December 1936, Stevens calls the ceaseless reporting and discussion of world events “the pressure of the contemporaneous,” which “from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme”: We are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely. We have a sense of upheaval. We feel threatened. We look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics. (Opus 229) By the time he delivered his “Noble Rider” speech at Harvard in the spring of 1941, the sense of claustrophobia permeating his 1937 speech had become more intense still: 258 J. Stan Barrett For more than ten years now, there has been an extraordinary pressure of news— let us say, news incomparably more pretentious than any description of it, news, at first, of the collapse of our system, or, call it, of life; then of news of a new world, but of a new world so uncertain that one did not...