The New Wallace Stevens Studies

“During Wallace Stevens’s lifetime, imperialism – “the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory” (Said 9) – was already a global institution. But imperialism also was becoming a more nebulous institution. Maintaining a distant empire seemed to be requiring less conquering and brutal control of subject peoples (whether the British ruling over India or the French over North and West Africa), and more developing of complex ideological, cultural, and social practices, all operating within the matrix of global capitalism. Or as Stevens put it in “Owl’s Clover,” “the books / For sale in Vienna and Zurich to people in Maine, / Ontario, Canton” (CPP 576). By the 1960s, scholars gave this evolving phenomenon of imposed cultural representation and ideological soft coercion a name: “cultural imperialism” (Tomlinson 2). Since the publication of Fredric Jameson’s seminal “Modernism and Imperialism” (1988), a growing number of critics have examined the ways in which modernist culture was a persistent yet suppressed part of the story of cultural imperialism. Literary and artistic practices, they argued, were inflected by the historical conditions of empire, imperialism, and colonialism experienced worldwide during the first half of the twentieth century. Critics such as Frank Lentricchia and Aldon Lynn Nielsen observed that Stevens’s poetry, in particular, embraced or at least condoned certain tropes of imperial and racial domination. Even Jameson saw Stevens’s work as an example of the phenomenon. The poet often absorbed “Third World material” as part of his art’s systematic operation, explained Jameson: cultural objects marked as exotic were transformed “back into Nature and virtual landscape” in his poetry (“Stevens” 15)”–