Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic Mode

Chapter 3: What Could Not Be Shaken

It should come as no surprise that Stevens’s concern with apocalyptic interpretations of the war and with the possibility that the war might produce a “radical break” with(in) literary and cultural history also marks the poetry written shortly before and after “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” Here again, the poetry’s figurations of gender do not just alternate between masculine and feminine positions , but explore, as the essay does, a wide range of different masculinities . Here, it is worth remembering that Stevens lived out several such masculine roles: son, lover, husband, father, businessman, poet, and so on. In the following pages, I shall investigate the ways Stevens tests their continued viability and relevance—in both social and poetic terms—in a time of war. And since poetic genres and modes also have inscribed within them particular conventions of gendered identity which their speakers must negotiate in order to produce the recognizable marks of those genres—the poet/lover of pastoral, the prophet of apocalyptic vision—the essay will also consider the role of specific poetic genres and modes in Stevens’s resistance to the possibility of a “radical break” with(in) literary history. The discussion that follows focuses on three short wartime lyrics— “Girl in a Nightgown” () and “Martial Cadenza” () from Parts of a World and “Dutch Graves in Bucks County” () from Transport to Summer—and also explores the problems generated by these works in relation to a number of Stevens’s other wartime lyrics. The first two of these poems in particular cannot be considered “major” texts in the Stevens canon and have not received a great deal of critical attention outside of studies, like that of Filreis’s Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, that are explicitly concerned with the politics of Stevens’s war poetry. All questions of aesthetic value or thematic “weight” aside—“Girl in a Nightgown” in particular does not strike me as one of Stevens’s more successful “minor” works—these poems are useful precisely because of their marginality: they show us Stevens chapter three What Could Not Be Shaken Meditation in a Time of War working through problems that often appear to have been resolved (or, as Marjorie Perloff suggests, elided) in the major achievements like Notes toward a Supreme Fiction. My purpose, then, is not to move these texts from margin to center, nor to construct a narrative of Stevens’s poetic development during the war years around these texts. The unresolved and crisis-ridden “Contrary Theses (I),” for example , comes from the same year () as the far more confident “Martial Cadenza,” and appears at a much later point in Parts of a World, and the seaside idyll of “Variations on a Summer Day” appears between the more problematical “Girl in a Nightgown” and “Martial Cadenza.” What one finds in the poems of this period is not so much a clear line of development as a sequence of shifts between two very different affective responses to the war. My purpose, then, is simply to explore three individual moments of crisis in Stevens’s wartime poetic career, and, in particular, to demonstrate how a series of shifts in the masculine subject-positions embodied by the poems’ speakers help clarify Stevens’s response to the possibility of a “radical break” in or with the world historical and cultural/aesthetic continua. In “Girl in a Nightgown,” a war-haunted poem of , Stevens tests three different masculine positions (father, prophet, pastoral poet) and two poetic modes (apocalyptic, pastoral) against “a violence from without” that threatens the speaker’s lyric interiority and sense of connection to literary tradition. Alan Filreis insists that “Girl in a Nightgown” is not concerned with war at all, since it was written in  (Actual World ); but although the poem obviously cannot reflect upon a world war that has not yet begun, it nevertheless can respond to the civil war already brought about by Spanish fascism. It can also express fears that further war might be instigated by highly militaristic, expansionist, and racist fascist governments in other countries. In other words,  was as good (or bad) a year as any for worrying about war, and I hope to show that “Girl in a Nightgown” struggles with the problem of inscribing such public and political fears within the largely private and interior realm of lyric poetry. It is possible to read “Girl” as an almost autobiographical meditation on the way world politics impinge upon domesticity, and such a reading...