The Politics of Utopia

doi:10.1017/9781108973946.003

Chapter 2 - The Politics of Utopia

from Part I - Emerging Concepts in Stevens Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021

Douglas Mao

Edited by

Bart Eeckhout and

Gül Bilge Han

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Bart Eeckhout: Affiliation:
Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Gül Bilge Han: Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

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Summary

Scholars of Wallace Stevens have variously represented him as a crafter of poetic utopias, a skeptic of utopian thinking, and a champion of utopian material sufficiency. Mao’s chapter adds to the picture by showing how, in his poetry of the late 1930s and early 1940s, Stevens situates leaders and movements impelled by visions of ideal futures within a conception of political life as an ongoing struggle for dominance between ideas. Reading texts such as “Owl’s Clover,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas” in relation to Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia and Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons, the chapter shows that Stevens’s view of history as an interplay of imagination and reality partook of important currents in interwar intellectual life.

Keywords

Wallace Stevens ideas ideology imagination Lenin Max Lerner Karl Mannheim politics utopia utopianism

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Wallace Stevens Studies , pp. 29 - 43

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108973946.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2021

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References

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