[New-Poetry] Stevens as a war poet?

[JforJames at aol.com]

Two nights ago, _The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens_ 
(http://www.wesleyan.edu/wstevens/stevens.html)  with the  Hartford Public Library had James 
Longenbach as our guest speaker. His talk was  entitled "An Examination of 
Wallace Stevens in a Time of War." Generally,  Longenbach's thesis was that Stevens 
did care about what was happening around  him in the world, and that he used 
his poetry not as evasion but as way to  inflect and to change those impinging 
circumstances of existence. Longenbach,  using the example of the composition 
of one his own poems, told about how a box  of paperclips had been one of the 
poem's triggering elements. However,  Longenbach choose not to make that 
specific thing an image in the poem. The  imagination would not be pinned to that 
particular reality.

A key quote  in the talk was this one from Opus Posthumous:

"The pressure of  the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the 
World War to the  present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have 
lived apart in a  happy oblivion."

Stevens goes on to state:

"In poetry, to that  extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because 
that is only the nominal  subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. 
Resistance to the pressure of  ominous and destructive circumstance consists of 
its conversion, so far as  possible, into a different, an explicable, an 
amenable circumstance." 
-- 
Finnegan 




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