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IN MARCH of 1935, The New Republic published Wallace Stevens' "Restatement [sic] of Romance," a poem that, despite its title, lacks any of the passion, sensuality, sentimentality, or effusiveness characteristic of so much conventional romantic poetry. If this is an expression of "romantic love," it is one that appears, at first blush, to be muted and modest, and thus in every sense wnromantic. Because of this, the poem's title - as so often with Stevens - perplexes or appears to misdirect the reader. If anything, the poem represents a life devoid of love as we commonly understand it.
It is easy to contrast Stevens' mid-1930s "statement" to his earlier work, which, in spite of its frequent cerebralism, is often passionate, mischievous, witty, even playful. The man whose poetic hallmark was the recondite abstraction and equanimous sentiment of poems such as "The Snow Man" or "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws" was also the effusive and expansive poet of "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" and "Peter Quince at the Clavier," someone moreover who rejoiced in the earthy pleasures and lusty romance represented by his poems about Key West and the South, such as "O, Rorida, Venereal Soil," "Floral Decorations for Bananas," and "Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion" - all of which were published in his first volume, Harmonium (1923). The publication of Stevens' second volume, Ideas of Order (1935), which included "Re-statement of Romance" (with its title hyphenated this time), marked a significant emotional departure from Harmonium. In Ideas of Order, beginning notably with "Farewell to Rorida," Stevens signaled an abandonment of the "ever-freshened Keys" for the "slime of men in crowds" and a "return to the violent mind / That is their mind" (CPP 97-98). This change in taste and temperament, as many have noted before me, was not only the likely result of a middleaged man sensing his mortality, but also marked an aesthetic shift away from a mode of expression that had failed to respond to the "pressure of reality" (CPP 654-56) represented by World War I, the Great Depression, emergent Communism, and the looming specter of World War ?. Thus, upon an initial reading of "Re-statement of Romance," we are inclined to wonder whether this was the only kind of...