THE prompted (1934) DEVELOPMENT into by the the five-poem 1935 OF review the sequence poem of Ideas" The" Owl's of Old Order Woman Clover" by Marxist and (1936) the Stanley Statue" was (1934) into the five-poem sequence" Owl's Clover"(1936) was prompted by the 1935 review of Ideas of Order by Marxist Stanley Burnshaw and the challenge of the leftist literary-political movement that that review, to Wallace Stevens' mind, stood for." Owl's Clover" is anomalous in Stevens' work in the explicitness of its engagement with contem-poraneous social and political circumstances, featuring in its cast of characters Burnshaw himself, the socialist" Bułgar," and gun-wielding Europeans in Africa. Critical attention to the poem, which initially focused on the extent to which that engagement is aesthetically successful, has recently focused on the extent to which it is politically satisfactory. Some recent accounts have demonstrated that the poem contains fairly specific and not unsophisticated responses (some critical, some receptive) to certain aspects of the challenge of the left. 1 1 propose to show that the poem also contains a broader argument about art that implicitly denies that the artist has an obligation to make such responses. Underlying any statement about the virtues or inadequacies of politically engaged art must be an assumption about the ideal function of art in society. Stevens' response to what he understood to be the challenge from the left comes primarily, I believe, at the level of this more fundamental issue." Owl's Clover" develops a conception of the function of art in society that I will call, adapting Stevens' own term," exponency." An exponent can be one who expounds or interprets, a representative, an advocate, or a symbol. Stevens' conception of the social role of the artist is a subtle compound of all these senses of the term. This conception endures throughout his essays on reality and the imagination and is closely related to his conception, developed in the early 1940s, of poetry as a source of supreme fictions. His first statement of this conception, written, as Milton Bates notes, just after the completion of" Owl's Clover," appeared on the jacket of the 1936 trade edition of Ideas of Order (Bates 192)." The more realistic life may be," Stevens writes," the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination"; and" in any society, the poet should be the exponent of the imagination of that society"(OP 223). The wording is significant: the poet is to