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.
"...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.
Great piece. Complicated and brilliant. Thank you for this.