Wallace Stevens in a “Sudden Time”

Although Wallace Stevens’s work is often read as hermetic and aestheticizing in a time of radical politics, examining its formal properties shows that responding to the news of World War II was integral to Stevens’s poetics. His poetry conveys an abiding belief in the epistemological value of soldiers’ witnessing war in the flesh. How, then, can a civilian with no immediate experience of war press back against violence through a poem, as Stevens wrote? Contradictions, obstacles, and silences turn back upon themselves in Stevens’s wartime poems through rhetoric that indicates figures of relation and reflects on its own process of bridging distance. This chapter contends that, for Stevens, a civilian war poem must be self-reflexive to be ethical. It must dramatize its process; it must be responsive to current events and contemporary speech; and it must involve its readers in recognizing that the imagination’s relation to reality is mediated by war.