월러스 스티븐스 (Wallace Stevens) 시와 이데올로기

Wallace Stevens`s Poetry and Ideology: An Analysis of “Sunday Morning and” “The Idea of Order at Key West”

Many critics have claimed that there is a sharp contrast between the linguistic richness and the poverty of content in the poverty of Wallace Stevens. Most Stevens scholars have been content to comment on the philosophical profundity and the difficulty of meaning of Stevens`s poems and have largely ignored the political and ideological dimension in his poetry. However, recent critical theories have taught us that literary texts are not autonomous artifacts but enjoy an intimate relationship with the historical and social contexts in which they have their being. Even though it is more difficult to historicize Stevens`s poetry than of other writers, such enterprise is ultimately rewarding and should be encouraged. In this essay I challenge the idea that Stevens`s poems are mainly ahistorical and attempt to uncover the ideological and historical implications of his poetic enterprise. My essay is basically composed of readings of two Stevens poems: “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West”. My main argument is that these poems show Steven`s uneasy attitude toward, and reaction to, the dominant capitalist ideology of the times. A deeper reading of “Sunday Morning” uncovers Stevens`s genuine anxieties about the growing feminization and idealization of literature and, particularly, poetry, Stevens`s predecessors had reacted to the prevalent social atmosphere of the period, which was inimical toward poetry in general, by idealizing and sentimentalizing it. They misinterpreted Keats by converting him into a purely idealist poet. In many respects, “Sunday Morning” is a “decreation” of the artistic concepts of Stevens`s predecessors--the “defenders of ideality”--and the culturally popular image of Keats. It also shows Stevens`s “schizophrenia” cause by the dominant ideology. On the one hand, Stevens wanted to create a private atmosphere where he would be safe from the intrusion of bourgeois ideology. On the other, he wanted to affirm poetry`s significance and prove that it was not insignificant, trivial or “feminine” in 20th-century society. Thus the poem both shows the process of interiorization through which the poet hopes to escape from the constraints of capitalism and the celebration of “male utopia” which is an antithesis of the capitalist society. In “The Idea of Order at Key West” and other “Florida poems”, Florida becomes an exotic place which seems at first sight to stand in an opposite relation to the metropolitan centers of the capitalist order. But Stevens`s use of place-names and topography reveals that the socio-political contexts of the poems can never be erased. In addition, the performative act of the woman in “The Idea of Order at Key West” has distinctively ideological implications. On a certain level, the poem serves as an imperialist discourse. Like most Modernists, Stevens`s often ambiguous relationship with capitalism provided a consistent motive for the composition of his poems. More than anything else, his poems were “the cry of its occasion”. The social and political reality of 20th-century America offered him a chance to reflect and criticize the cultural problems that were produced by it. Therefore, Stevens scholarship must not limit itself to a purely textual approach toward Stevens but should attempt to reconstruct the historicity of his poems.