Wallace Stevens's Fascist Dilemmas and Free Market Resolutions

Abstract

Readers have long assumed that the heroic persona in well-known Wallace Stevens's poems such as “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937), “Asides on the Oboe” (1940), and “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” (1942) expresses an ideal version of the poet himself without insurance job distractions. The “impossible possible philosophers' man” in “Asides” is “The man who has had the time to think enough, / The central man” (lines 13–14). Even during wartime, this thinker aims for transcendence, something the “metal heroes”—soldiers, perhaps—cannot attain (6). He meditates upon the world and mediates between worlds to create brilliant poetic diamonds. “Central man” is no ethereal deity detached from current events but speaks to Stevens's oft-noted preoccupation with poetry's role during global crises such as the Depression. As “the glass man,” he transparently embodies “the place in which / He is” (18–19, 38). Yet by the 1940s, Stevens's figurations of heroism, whether of a central man or a “major man,” are insistently abstract. “The hero is not a person,” the speaker declares in “Examination” (VIII.1), an idea Charles Altieri expands upon: “Major man is our fiction of our own fullest self-satisfactions … abler in the abstract than in his singular” (150). While fascinated with modernist figurations of heroism, masculinity, and sovereignty during World War II, Stevens insists on the hero's detachment from worldly sources.1 Central man could never be General Patton.