pressure of the contemporaneous

Two nights ago, The Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens with the Hartford Public Library had James Longenbach as our guest speaker. His talk was entitled "An Examination of Wallace Stevens in a Time of War." Generally, Longenbach's thesis was that Stevens did care about what was happening around him in the world, and that he used his poetry not as evasion but as way to inflect and to change those impinging circumstances of existence. Longenbach, using the example of the composition of one his own poems, told about how a box of paperclips had been one of the poem's triggering elements. However, Longenbach choose not to make that specific thing an image in the poem. The imagination would not be pinned to that particular reality.

A key quote in the talk was this one from Opus Posthumous:

"The pressure of the contemporaneous from the time of the beginning of the World War to the present time has been constant and extreme. No one can have lived apart in a happy oblivion."

Stevens goes on to state:

"In poetry, to that extent, the subject is not the contemporaneous, because that is only the nominal subject, but the poetry of the contemporaneous. Resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance."