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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - The Politics of Utopia

  • from Part I - Emerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism
  • Edited by Bart Eeckhout, Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium, Gül Bilge Han, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The New Wallace Stevens Studies
    Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    08 July 2021, pp 29-43

  • Summary

    Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.