Perversely, I ask you to consider the poetry of Wallace Stevens. A white man of inheritance and marked privilege—the education and attainments of the Ivy League, law school, and employment in a Hartford, Connecticut, insurance business—Stevens could scarcely seem less relevant to this moment. We are convulsed by a cataclysmic, long-overdue reckoning with state violence against black lives (and indigenous, and LGBT, and Latinx, and other “othered” lives) and a criminal justice system that has kept America’s sin of slavery continuously alive in the streets, courts, and prisons; by a pandemic bred from our overpopulation and degradation of the planet; by the stark divide between the forces of authoritarian and democratic governance; by the persistent injustice of men towards the other half of the human race; and, through it all, capitalism’s power to grow ever stronger, while leaving wreckage in its wake.
"...the always heartbroken man living a heteronormative life who probably longed for male love...". If you're discussing a specifically sexual relationship, what gives you (or anyone) the right to wildly speculate in public about such a private, intimate matter, when there is literally not a single iota - not a shred - of evidence in all of Stevens' life that he had the slightest inclination. or proclivity towards such a preference? This sounds more like the author's desirous wish to bend Stevens' personality to fit their personal political desires.
Thank you for reading! I am not seeing an iota, to use your locution, of evidence that the reviewer's interest here is political. Few are able to read literature without inferring some human story behind it, though we probably all find different emotions there. Anyway, we are glad to have your perspective.
"...the always heartbroken man living a heteronormative life who probably longed for male love...". If you're discussing a specifically sexual relationship, what gives you (or anyone) the right to wildly speculate in public about such a private, intimate matter, when there is literally not a single iota - not a shred - of evidence in all of Stevens' life that he had the slightest inclination. or proclivity towards such a preference? This sounds more like the author's desirous wish to bend Stevens' personality to fit their personal political desires.
Thank you for reading! I am not seeing an iota, to use your locution, of evidence that the reviewer's interest here is political. Few are able to read literature without inferring some human story behind it, though we probably all find different emotions there. Anyway, we are glad to have your perspective.
Great piece. Complicated and brilliant. Thank you for this.