Bowl, Cat and Broomstick: Sweeping the Stage of Souvenirs

Abstract

Wallace Stevens usually is considered a lyric rather than a dramatic poet. Although his poems abound in dramatis personae, in monologue, dialogue, and theatrical metaphor, Stevens seems to lack the flair of Tennyson or Robert Browning, of Eliot or Pound, for creating dramatic characters and situations. Yet Stevens's work consistently reveals his interest in theater. The metaphor of the poem as a stage in the drama of shifting perceptions recurs throughout his work. Many of Stevens's poems dramatize his ideas about the function of art in a time of social upheaval, highlighting the interplay between reader and words, or characters. Indeed, many of Stevens's dramatis personae, from Crispin, to Peter Quince, to the Man on the Dump, to Canon Aspirin, are men [and women] made out of words (CP 355).1 As these characters assume familiar attitudes and roles of Western