“Many readers of Wallace Stevens,” notes the jacket copy of James Longenbach’s second book, “wonder at his ‘double’ life: the poet, crafting phrases of supernal elegance and beauty, and the lawyer and insurance executive, wading through life’s utilitarian chores with practical aplomb. For more than one critical generation it has seemed as if these two men were unacquainted. . . . [But this notion] is misleading. . . . Stevens was not only aware of the momentous events taking place around him, but often his poetry was inspired by those events. . . . [H]e . . . thought deeply about the strengths—and, equally important, the limitations—of poetry as a social product and force.”
This thesis is presented as revolutionary; but it’s hardly that. For who would argue that Stevens’s two “halves” were unacquainted, or that he was unaware of the Depression and world wars, or that he didn’t think deeply about poetry and society? What matters is that his poems, whether or not inspired by historic events, deal chiefly with abstract ideas and not politics. Longenbach, an associate professor at the University of Rochester, never really denies this, though he does offer his own version of the contemporary line that notto make a political statement is to make a political statement; as he puts it, “Stevens’s interest in poetic ambiguity” and “his concern with the limitations of the social function of poetry” are “part of a carefully modulated effort to assert the historicity of poetry and the polit-ical power of