Chapter 3 - Community and Audience

Summary

Though a prominent strand of Wallace Stevens studies argues that his poetry has neither a sense of the interpersonal nor any actual human audience to speak of, recent critics are at last taking Stevens seriously as a poet of community—a key word in recent work by several critics and a peripheral or secret subject in countless other studies. Questions of community and audience, Spaide finds, have helped these critics to reconceive both “the poem of the idea” and “the poem of the words”: critics drawn to the former have focused on Stevens’s historical and personal crises, political philosophy, aesthetics, place, and affect; those drawn to the latter have focused on Stevens’s diction, genres, forms, speakers, and lyric pronouns. Community and audience, for Stevens, are always counterbalanced by their others—individuality, impersonality, inhuman nature, aesthetic autonomy. Closing on a reading of “The Sick Man” (1950), Spaide concludes that Stevens’s truest subject is not community, not individuality, but the never-settled contest between the two.