“The World in a Verse”: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms

Abstract

“The World in a Verse”: Stevens, World History, and Global Modernisms Gül Bilge Han I. Introduction IN HIS 1942 ESSAY “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Wallace Stevens commented on the situation of the modern subject in a global context in the following way: It is not only that there are more of us and that we are actually close together. We are close together in every way. We lie in bed and listen to a broadcast from Cairo, and so on. There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us. (CPP 653) Written in the midst of US involvement in the Second World War, when seemingly distant events felt closer to home than ever, Stevens’s lines weave together the intimate and the global as a constitutive feature of ordinary, common life. His remarks highlight the emergence of new forms of cognitive and affective proximity between diverse places and subjects, fostered through new media technologies—particularly, the radio and how it relayed the news. The experience of a lack of “distance,” or of being “close together in every way . . . unhappily,” indicates an imposed mode of connectivity that threatens the demarcation of the boundaries between the individual and the collective, the local and the global, the private and the public realms. Stevens implicitly figures this new mode of collective intimacy as a threatening force against the domain of the individual self, which, in turn, suggests a common modernist trope. But Stevens’s poetic responses to the demands of the global and its distant others, especially from the 1930s onwards, express more than a desire to salvage a degree of individual autonomy and interiority from the intrusions of an increasingly globalized modernity, just as his skeptical reflections on the “broadcast from Cairo” do more than exhibit an anxiety over the advent of [End Page 133] communication technologies—resulting in “an extraordinary pressure of news” (CPP 655)—that brought the world closer in unprecedented ways. Certainly, the new media environment of the early and mid-twentieth century shaped the aesthetic and social sensibilities of modernist writers, including Stevens (Kalliney 121–56). Mass media and circulation of the news are, in fact, part and parcel of modernism’s global networks, in which the news sparked alternative forms of engagement with world events that were negotiated through different journalistic and media discourses. Such developments had crucial implications for modernist conceptualizations of world and self, since they allowed for new ways of imagining cultural and political transfers, across spaces and peoples, without necessitating physical closeness or direct contact. The news as a poetic and creative source, in particular, played a constitutive part in Stevens’s responses to the historical pressures of the actual world. He was, as Jahan Ramazani and Rachel Galvin have discussed most prominently, well aware of how the news “mediate[d] between the individual and the event,” how it shaped “the raw material of history” (Galvin 169), and thereby produced what Stevens called the “pressure of news . . . of a new world” against which he imagined poetry should and would push back (CPP 655). But what seemed equally pressing for Stevens, judging by his wartime remarks, is the emergence of a global collective consciousness reinforced by the news technologies and the media: the heightened presence of an imaginative collective vision, intensified by the globally perceived events of his epoch, which included the Great Depression, two world wars, and the rise of fascism. In “The Noble Rider,” Stevens refers to this shared collective sensibility as “the consciousness of the world,” which he feared would replace the “imagination,” as he put it in the same essay.1 “[F]or more than ten years,” Stevens wrote, “the consciousness of the world has concentrated on events which have made the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm” (CPP 655). Seen at once as a creative and suffocating force, this consciousness of the world manifests itself most markedly in Stevens’s envisaging of the poetic imagination as a potential source for a global vision of collectivity, or what he calls a “civil...