Wallace Stevens and the Invention of Social Security

Michael Szalay

When many millions of people all over the world demand security and a state that must guarantee it, that's one thing. But when bowlers or batsmen, responsible for an activity essentially artistic and individual, are dominated by the same principles, then the result is what we have.

--C. L. R. James, "The Welfare State of Mind"

In his State of the Union address of 1935, Franklin Roosevelt reaffirmed his commitment before Congress and the American people to make it his "first and continuing task" to provide for the "security of the men, women and children of the nation." ¹ Later that year, as he signed the Social Security Act into law, he explained that the legislation was a necessary response to the facts of the modern industrial world. A national insurance plan like Social Security, designed to provide some minimal form of protection from adverse contingencies that individuals could neither anticipate nor control, was needed because "the civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure." ² Acknowledging that it was impossible to "insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life," he nonetheless expressed the hope that Social Security would give "some measure of protection to the average citizen." ³

Two years later, in his essay "Insurance and Social Change," Wallace Stevens defended the Social Security Administration to his coworkers at the Hartford Fire and Indemnity Company, [End Page 49] rebutting the claim that the welfare-state incursion into insurance practice would fragment an already diminished market. Stressing the fact that the private industry looked to offer "insurance for everything," as opposed to the government's "insurance for all," Stevens argued that federal insurance, far from competing with private insurance, provided the precondition for the latter's efforts to "perfect" insurance coverage. "To be certain of a regular income, as in the case of social security," reasoned Stevens, "is not the same thing as to be able to repair any damage, or to meet any emergency." ⁴ Indeed it is only when Americans were certain of a regular income that they could afford the "insurance for everything" offered by the private industry.

Social Security was seen in this way to offer one solution to the depression specter of "underconsumption," the notion that the nation's economic troubles were traceable less to excessive industrial production than to the failure of Americans to consume what was produced. "Insurance and Social Change," however, also suggests a more literary solution to the problem of underconsumption. According to Stevens, nothing stimulated demand more than representing a product in its perfected form. Stevens reasons, for example, that "it helps us to see [the value of] insurance in the midst of social change to imagine a world in which insurance has been made perfect" ("ISC," 234). He goes on to observe that H. G. Wells revitalized the field of mechanical science in this manner, coyly noting that "If Mr. Wells has preferred the machine to insurance as his field, he has only left insurance to others" ("ISC," 234). Thus Wallace Stevens, poet, makes his bid to be the H. G. Wells of insurance. But Stevens goes farther still. In "Adagia" (1934-37), he claims not simply that poetry might usefully represent the workings of perfect insurance, but that it can actually perform them. "Poetry," he writes, "is a purging of the world's poverty and change and evil and death." ⁵ This statement doubles the assertion in "Insurance and Social Change" that perfect insurance brings about "a world in which nothing unpleasant can happen" and where "all our wishes . . . come true" ("ISC," 234). Indeed given these criteria, one might reasonably argue that perfect insurance could be found only in poetry: where else but in a poem could a wish eliminate evil and death?

The suggestion that poetry might somehow "eliminate" evil and death, however, was more likely to consign it to social irrelevance than establish it as an active force in the mitigation of insecurity. Nothing was more common throughout the 1930s, and more potentially damning, than the claim that poetry provided a safe haven from the withering realities of the depression, a place as insulated from want and suffering as the shimmering worlds projected in the nation's movie theaters. Speaking from a proto-Popular Front Left in the 1935 New Masses, Stanley Burnshaw makes the scathing observation that "contemporary poets . . . have all tramped off to some escapist limbo where they are joyously gathering moonshine." ⁶ At the other end of the political spectrum, the southern Agrarian John Crowe Ransom in 1938 derides the poet who invents "a private world where . . . injustice cannot be and enjoy it as men enjoy their dream." ⁷ Bread lines called for more than fantastical worlds, and Burnshaw and Ransom were just two of many who felt that the depression made [End Page 50] unavoidable the differences between security of an imaginative and a substantive financial kind.

Yet condemnations of inexcusably "private" retreats into the poetic imagination do not so much undermine the analogy between Stevens's poetry and insurance as explain why that relationship is constructed through a defense of Social Security. It is in this respect crucial that Stevens defends Social Security in "Insurance and Social Change" by insisting that "perfect insurance" needed to take an unmistakably public form. Stevens asks, for example, that we "Compare the man who, as an individual, insures his dwelling against fire with that personality of the first plane who, at a stroke, insures all dwellings against fire; and who, without stopping to think about it, insures not only the lives of all those that live in the dwellings, but insures all people against all happenings" ("ISC," 234). The identity of this personality is left suggestively nebulous; he seems at once Roosevelt, God, and a messianic poet turned insurance provider. But whoever or whatever it is, Stevens's personality does not retreat from the world into a private imagination. In fact, the office this personality performs seems public precisely because it is opposed to thought of any kind. Stevens's poetic corpus of the 1930s and early 1940s opposes "stopping to think" to public action in just this manner. Stevens's poetry persistently stages the substitution of thought with the "impersonal" representation of social relationships; hence his aphorism "People take the place of thoughts" ("A," 198). For Stevens, then, insurance and poetry both supervene at the limits of intentional agency; in his conception of both insurance and poetry, the objectification of social relationships compensates for the fact that no premeditated plan can ever make the future sufficiently secure.

"Insurance and Social Change" therefore marks the moment at which Stevens comes to understand poetry as being importantly related to the necessarily public activities of America's first welfare state, in particular to the federal "insurance for all," Social Security, that has emerged as the New Deal's most sacrosanct legacy. "We feel threatened," Stevens notes at his first public lecture in 1936; "[w]e look from an uncertain present toward a more uncertain future. One feels the desire to collect oneself against all this in poetry as well as in politics." ⁸ Roosevelt would of course "collect" against the future in a strictly economic sense: "We must begin now to make provisions for the future," he declared during a Fireside Chat on 28 April 1935. ⁹ Nonetheless, poetry and politics alike would after 1935 address themselves at a much deeper level to structures of agency defined in relation to necessarily imaginative invocations of the future.

"Relatively to a given human being," reasons Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Common Law, "anything is accident which he could not fairly have been expected to contemplate as possible . . . ." ¹⁰ Accidents have meaning, Holmes makes clear, only to the extent that they mark a transgression of our imaginative capacities, our ability to envision future states. It is in this context hardly surprising that a poet as concerned with the imagination as Stevens would work in close orbit to a government committed to providing for the future. The suggestion that accidents are defined [End Page 51] only in relation to what cannot be anticipated might lead to the conclusion that shoring up individual agency meant expanding the individual's imaginative capacities such that he could be able to anticipate all future contingency. Yet this suggestion just as plausibly leads to the opposite conclusion, namely, that individuals could protect themselves only by renouncing the value of the imagination per se. Stevens, I have already suggested, reached the latter conclusion. Thus his project of affixing the poetic to the rising star of an increasingly interventionist government did not call for the integration of life and art, nor did it make claims for the literal outcomes poetry might effect. Far from a self-confident activism, the insistence on the provision of security instead marked the outer limits of federal as well as poetic agency; after 1935, welfare government and poetry both would work to compensate, after the fact, for all they could not imagine, for all they could not prevent.

1.

Michael Denning notes in The Cultural Front that "the public cultural apparatus was virtually invented by the New Deal." ¹¹ He explains, "The state sponsorship of writers, artists, theaters, and musicians that began in the spring of 1935 under the Works Progress Administration as relief from the present crisis became an attempt to redefine American culture and to create a 'culture of democracy' by establishing a bureaucracy that would provide 'culture' for the people" (CF, 44). This culture of democracy is not Denning's primary concern. Far from it; his book is instead devoted to demonstrating the existence of a broadly conceived "cultural front" that was "not simply New Deal liberalism" (CF, xvii). The Left during the New Deal, he claims with equal anxiousness, was not simply "the product of the new cultural apparatuses of the state and industry" (CF, 96). Thus The Cultural Front sets out to recover a substrata of working-class radicalism, a "laboring of American culture" that remained distinct from, and ultimately survived, New Deal liberalism. But beyond the fact that he uses it as a foil for cultural-front radicalism, it remains entirely unclear throughout what exactly Denning means by New Deal liberalism. Denning's refusal to reveal the criteria that might distinguish New Deal liberalism from a capaciously defined cultural front turns out seriously to compromise his ability to understand the public cultural apparatus the New Deal did in fact invent.

In what follows, I will insist that insofar as there was a coherent New Deal liberalism, it was organized around not a nebulously conceived culture of democracy, but what Roosevelt termed his "security legislation" (FDR, 86). The Social Security Administration and the Works Progress Administration in particular formed what he called a "new order of things," of which "every major legislative enactment of . . . Congress should be a component part" (FDR, 82, 83). The Federal Writers' Project--part of this new order--supported more than seven thousand writers at its peak in 1937. More importantly, by 1937, the project's commitment to security had [End Page 52] produced an entirely new set of answers to what John Dos Passos, writing on the nature of literary professionalism, called "the whole question of what writing is." ¹²

The official New Deal answer to Dos Passos was implicit in the wage structure that the Writers' Project offered: according to Harry Alsberg, director of the project, writing could be secured from economic contingency only when it was more a public activity subject to regulation than a privately owned product. The weekly salary paid writers for producing material they would never own and never have to sell (usually between $20 and $30) made this unmistakably clear. Thus when Richard Wright notes in "How Bigger Was Born" that "just as a man rises in the morning to dig ditches for his bread, so I'd work daily [writing Native Son]," his invocation of labor carries a literal force that a phrase like "the laboring of American culture" does not: Wright was working for a Writers' Project wage when he started writing Native Son, a novel that would "strive to heighten the consciousness of the [petty bourgeoisie] to all those progressive forces making for security in American life." ¹³ Wright in fact was on the federal payroll even as he was writing it, for he was a member of the elite Creative Writers' Project, a unit of the Writers' Project that paid writers to work on their own material (in this case material that would comprise Native Son). ¹⁴

Moreover, the rise of New Deal patronage led a broad contingent of writers--including those who had not themselves been made "clients" of the New Deal by working on the projects and those who were at best ambivalently associated with the Left--to theorize the relation between the specific modes of support used to enable writing and the aesthetic criteria used to justify that support. Robert Frost's pre-New Deal claim in "Build Soil, A Political Pastoral" (1932) that "Thought product and food product are to me / nothing compared to the producing of them" left Burnshaw unsure of the poet's political affiliations. ¹⁵ The political commitment to writing as labor and the concomitant generality of the antimarket sentiment that the lines convey could not then be specified with any kind of accuracy. ¹⁶ By 1935, however, Ernest Hemingway's antithetical and quintessentially modernist claim that his writing was something "round and whole and solid" could be understood as inseparable from his often scathing criticism of the WPA and the salary it provided its workers. ¹⁷ Hemingway's relation to the New Deal can be most successfully elaborated through his aesthetic convictions; Hemingway would repeatedly make clear that his writing was above all else an artifact, and in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and To Have and Have Not this artifact is shown not only to be impervious to the woundings that plague the characters, but finally to be more resilient to unexpected change than any person putatively secured by the New Deal. ¹⁸

But even Frost's "Build Soil," first delivered during the primaries for the 1932 presidential election, provides a compelling example of how "security legislation" ideas inflected, avant la lettre, modernist efforts at poetic self-definition. Modeled on Virgil's "First Eclogue," the poem takes as its subject the social obligations incurred with different forms of literary patronage: should the poet Tityrus, the poem asks, somehow address in his poetry the impoverishment of his peer [End Page 53] Meliboeus, who is struggling at self-employment? Unlike Meliboeus, both Virgil's and Frost's Tityrus draw their respective wages from public institutions meant to secure them from the market: Virgil's from the Roman state, and Frost's from a university poets-in-residence program (presumably like the one at which Frost himself was then employed). ¹⁹

In both Virgil's and Frost's pastorals, Tityrus is asked for help by the farmer Meliboeus; in both he refuses the plea for assistance. In "Build Soil," Tityrus tells the suffering farmer that the only revolution available is a "one man revolution":

. . . inside in is where we've got to get.
My friends all know I'm interpersonal.
But long before I'm interpersonal,
Away way down inside I'm personal.

["BS," 320]

Thus even though Frost seems to champion something like Social Security when he writes elsewhere that it is "Better to go down dignified / With boughten friendship at your side / Than none at all," Tityrus claims that poetry is most valuable in its ability to counterbalance the forms of interpersonal association that programs like Social Security demanded. ²⁰ "We're too unseparate out among each other" insists Tityrus, and we are meant to believe that poetry, imagined as a private form of nonmarketed labor, compensates for this fact ("BS," 324).

It is of course not clear how this advice helps Meliboeus, particularly because Tityrus's refusal to take his thought product to market is not private in any clear sense--on the contrary, it is underwritten by a salary unavailable to Meliboeus. Meliboeus therefore concludes the poem by ironically paraphrasing Tityrus's incoherence, stating that "going home / From company means coming to our senses" ("BS," 325). If a reassuring poetic retreat from a threatening reality is a familiar theme in pastoral, then so is the pronominal oscillation that here confuses the isolate with the collective. ²¹ What does it mean, for instance, that "we" come to "our" senses only when "we" are most alone? In what respect does the often conflicted movement to collective pronouns that marks pastoral generally and Frost's poem specifically alter Tityrus's claim that poetry is the last bastion against the eroding of private and autonomous experience? These questions point to what recent critics have seen as the defining problematic in New Deal writing. One critic argues that James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (the preeminent New Deal pastoral) "is a product of the Great Depression, which," he insists, "still occupies a mythic place as the moment when irrepressible private suffering publicly marked a faltering of capitalism." This critic then goes on to note how the work "replicate[s] the antinomies of private and public as a tension between artistic independence and corporate patronage." ²² In this account independence seems to mean privacy, and we are meant to understand that the history of art since the New Deal has been the history of art's [End Page 54] betrayal at the hands of government and corporate modes of patronage antithetical to that privacy.

This kind of nostalgia for "artistic independence" misses entirely the significance of those formal and stylistic developments brought about by the rise of both state and corporate patronage--misses, in other words, the transformations undergone by American modernism as it impacted with the New Deal. Stevens's poetry in particular does not dramatize the antagonism between private independence and public support so much as it demonstrates how the rise of corporate patronage facilitated and was perfectly consistent with a relocation of poetic interest, already in progress, from the private "I" to the public "we." Stevens will show what is implicit in Frost's poem, namely that valuing literary labor at the expense of the literary artifact is significant not because it enables a private retreat from the market but because it relocates the poetic domain from private experience to public paradigms that authenticate experience in the process of making it reproducible. Alsberg would proudly declare that his project provided writers with a form of collective and impersonal artistic labor unavailable since the late Middle Ages, suggesting in this way a necessary relation between the project's employment structure (writers would punch a clock on group projects that rarely bore their names) and the value of the work it produced. Modernist impersonality would loom large in Stevens's work as well; he declares in "Adagia" that "Poetry is not a personal matter" ("A," 189), and would use his own source of income--the insurance company--to understand the ways in which the regulation of objectified social relationships enabled rather than threatened the sanctity and security of the individual, both in poetry and business.

All insurance practice, private or public, poetic or political, aggregates social relationships. Before any insurance practice becomes concerned with the ways it will sell its product to individual persons, it works to understand those persons in terms of population groups. The category of risk in particular identifies the frequency with which a given outcome will occur in a generalized target group. Actuarial science in this manner calculates the probability of specific outcomes occurring in specific populations. But in fact, risk is not predictive for the individual at all, for while it might make sense to say, based upon past calculations, that thirty percent of all adult males in a given test group will be in at least one automobile accident before they are forty years old, it does not make sense to say that there is a thirty-percent risk that a given adult male within that group will have an automobile accident before that age. "Risk is collective," explains François Ewald. "Whereas an accident, as damage, misfortune and suffering, is always individual, striking at one and not another, a risk of accident affects a population. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an individual risk." ²³

The point here is that an insurance practice is able to order and systematize what seem to be random events by studying those events as they occur in population groups. In "The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance" (1944), George Bernard Shaw asks, "how is it possible to budget for solvency in dealing with matters of chance? The answer is that when dealt with in sufficient numbers, matters of [End Page 55] chance become matters of certainty." ²⁴ As Shaw goes on to explain, insurance is used to account for events in their most public and generalizable form, and as such is relatively uninterested in the irreducibly private dimensions of personal experience. This is why, for example, insurance is of such interest to a thinker like Michel Foucault. Foucault sees insurance as insistently, almost coercively, collective and consequently identifies it as one of the principle mechanisms through which the modern state manages population groups. ²⁵ It is crucial to insurance practice that it "secure" the population group more than any one individual within it. Insurance cannot guarantee that individuals do not experience accidents, and the indemnification it offers is never an exact substitute for the loss incurred in any given experience. Instead, insurance guarantees that one person's experiences will not be transferred to others as a loss (when, for example, an insured individual is able to continue to meet his financial obligations after a work-stopping injury). Insurance underwrites, as Stevens puts it, "a world in which nothing unpleasant can happen," not by somehow insulating private experience from public reality, but by relocating the social significance of experience from the private and the subjective to the public and the transferable.

Frost's phrase "boughten friendship" is useful here, for it exemplifies how insurance transforms relations once thought to be the product of a private proclivity into generalizable economic relations newly dependent upon the "interpersonal" nexus Frost's Tityrus so despises. Stevens's third-person lyric achieves this same interpersonality, for it shifts poetic identification from inner experience to objectifications of the social never reducible to any one person's experience. Indeed Stevens brings to the fore the actuarial nature of his poetry in a poem explicitly about the transition from a first-person voice committed to the "private" imagination to a more scientific means of representing public relationships.

Reviewing Stevens's Ideas of Order, Burnshaw claims in 1935 that in "The Idea of Order at Key West," "contradictory notions" produce a poem in which "uncertainties are unavoidable." ²⁶ When later asked the perceived source of that uncertainty, Burnshaw answered that the middle-class and politically unaffiliated Stevens was "unable to make alliance with what we considered to be the forces that would make things better." ²⁷ But Stevens does very specifically refer to a compensatory mechanism designed to "make things better" (insurance) when he insists to his editor just after this review that "in 'The Idea of Order at Key West' life has ceased to be a matter of chance." ²⁸ Stevens explains his comment by noting, "it may be that every man introduces his own order into the life about him and that the idea of order is simply what Bishop Berkeley might have called a fortuitous concourse of personal orders. But still there is order" (L, 293).

It is not immediately clear what it means for chance to be replaced by a "fortuitous concourse of personal orders." If the elimination of chance is "fortuitous"--and not the result of the personal agency gestured to in the phrase "every man introduces"--then in what respect has chance been eliminated? Stevens's comment, however, [End Page 56] makes perfect sense in the context of the actuarial science just discussed: to recall Shaw, "when dealt with in sufficient numbers, matters of chance become matters of certainty." What appears fortuitous to one person is, from a more totalized perspective, part of a predictable pattern; as one economist explains insurance, whereas "individuals may face uncertainty . . . society can face approximate certainty." ²⁹ As I will show below, "The Idea of Order" depends upon this move from the isolated individual to the population group, which is why Stevens can explain the elimination of chance in that poem with the simple but authoritative assertion, "But still there is order": chance becomes probability--becomes calculable--the moment that a set of what at first seem to be discrete accidental events takes on a recognizable pattern if viewed at the level of an entire population. Paradoxically, life becomes a matter of risk when it "ceases to be a matter of chance." Stevens's desire to collect oneself against uncertainty consequently emerges here with a literal force: uncertainty is eliminated when individuals are "collected" into population groups impersonal enough to turn chance into probability, impersonal enough to warrant Stevens's third-person lyric. That Frost, committed as he was to the inviolate privacy of the poetic experience, should write to Burnshaw at this time that "it was chance when the right subject matter and the right words came together" is in this context not surprising: ³⁰ looking "inside in," a poetic devoted to the private will invariably experience as accidental those events that, seen from a totalizing perspective, constitute the most perfect of orders.

2.

If Frost had reason to associate his job at a university writing program with more overt modes of government employment, Stevens, who had been made vice president of Hartford Fire and Indemnity in 1934, had even more reason to believe he was working for a corporation that was in many respects indistinguishable from the New Deal. This was viable in part because by 1935 Roosevelt had made the New Deal stand or fall on its ability to provide security. More importantly, the modes of social organization intrinsic to insurance provided the pattern for many of the New Deal's economic and social programs. Long before the New Deal, the insurance company had offered the preeminent model for what would come to be called the welfare state: Oliver Wendell Holmes remarks in 1881, for instance, that "[t]he state might conceivably make itself a mutual insurance company against accidents, and distribute the burden of its citizens' mishaps among all its members. There might be a pension for paralytics, and state aid for those who suffered in person or estate from tempest or wild beasts." ³¹ However fanciful this proposal might have seemed to Holmes, it usefully demonstrates how easily private insurance practice did in fact become public. Indeed by 1939, a novelist like Josephine Herbst refused to distinguish between private and public forms of insurance: she writes that the New Deal had entered into a "conspiracy" with the insurance company; "as long as this government [End Page 57] exists," a character exclaims in her Rope of Gold, insurance is the one basic reliable investment." ³²

For Herbst, to be committed to insurance was in some sense already to be committed to the New Deal. Just as the private insurance industry promised security in its ability to extend to its clients an artificial and financially defined family, Roosevelt's security legislation promised a form of "boughten friendship" as a function of American citizenship itself. To the extent that modern life left the individual unable to plan or effect his future, Roosevelt offered him security by facilitating and regulating his access to those resources at the disposal of an officially sanctioned national-population group. "A million persons organized as a state can do things that cannot be dared by private individuals," notes Shaw, things that "no private company can do." ³³

In the years leading up to the establishment of the Social Security Administration and the WPA, however, it seemed that an interventionist state might do more than simply provide for individual security. At first, the acknowledgment that the individual is unable to cause or even foresee the conditions of his economic existence led to the hope that government might secure for itself the agency unavailable to individual persons. During the early years of the New Deal (1933-35), public opinion overwhelmingly supported the pooling of more than financial resources; it supported, that is, a form of national planning that would locate in government the capacity for intentional agency that the uncertainty of modern life was seen to threaten. The desire for economic centralization, which gave the state the power not to ameliorate the effects of economic downturns but to direct the course of the economy such that there would be no downturns, resulted in what Frank Warren has called "an apotheosis of the idea of planning, in which planning became almost synonymous with liberalism." ³⁴

Thus whereas Soviet and German economies--both committed to national planning--turned to an increasingly authoritarian centrism, the New Deal's "associational" economy, orchestrated by the National Recovery Administration (NRA), was sold as the culmination of democratic representation. ³⁵ "There is nothing complicated about it," Roosevelt declared of the NRA during a Fireside Chat. "It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about" (FDR, 65). But the NRA was seen to articulate and organize more than collective accomplishments, more even than collective hopes. "The social will," noted Rexford Tugwell while presenting his case for what would shortly thereafter become the NRA, "is a vague and elusive thing, difficult to apprehend, more difficult to pin down to specific issues." ³⁶ "Governments," however, "presumably, are expressions of [the] social will. That is their excuse for being." ³⁷ Thus the plans formulated by the NRA were sold as the product of a national collectivity: Roosevelt would describe the NRA as a brain trust of macro-economic proportions. During the years leading up to the dismantling of the NRA in 1935, Roosevelt described the New Deal as "the public's government" because it articulated nothing less than the public will (FDR, 128). [End Page 58]

According to Walter Lippmann, any endeavor like the NRA was doomed from the start, not because Roosevelt's economic council would ignore the public's will, but because the public did not have a will. In The Phantom Public (1927), Lippmann, responding in large part to Herbert Hoover's repeated corporate-liberal invocations of the public interest, insisted that a public was not a person, and that there was no meaningful sense in which a public could be said to have interests, let alone intentional agency. Intentional agency dissolved during the move from the individual to the public; there was, he claimed, only a virtual and impersonal public, one that by definition could not formulate designs. "A mere phantom," "an abstraction," the public was not "a fixed body of individuals," and therefore could never "direct . . . the course of events." ³⁸

Lippmann's claim that a collective entity like the public could only mistakenly be conceived of as an agent would become recast as a central criticism of the welfare state in the hands of a laissez-faire conservative like Ayn Rand. In Atlas Shrugged (1957), her libertarian Übermensch John Galt hijacks a radio broadcast from a band of aging New Dealers and speaks to a captive audience: "The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society--a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself." ³⁹ But as Rand would insist again and again, "Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush." ⁴⁰ There was no sense in which one could attribute intention of any kind to a collective. Howard Roark, the modernist hero of The Fountainhead (1943), Rand's most explicitly anti-New Deal polemic, puts this most simply during the trial at the close of the novel. Roark stands accused of blowing up a government housing project that he designed, but that has been altered by others. "The mind is an attribute of the individual," Roark explains:

There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts. The primary act--the process of reason--must be performed alone. . . . No man can use his brain to think for another. All the functions of body and spirit are private. They cannot be shared or transferred. ⁴¹

For Roark, as well as for Rand, the welfare state rested on the faulty premise that public, collective groups could perform those functions reserved for private, necessarily singular persons. In this instance, Rand's caricature was not without its basis. In Liberalism and Social Action (1935), a defense of an "organized social control of economic forces," John Dewey claimed that the state "has to assume the responsibility for making it clear that intelligence is a social asset, and is clothed with a function as public as its origin." ⁴²

On the other hand, John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), perhaps the most important influence on the future of the American welfare state, made clear in economic terms that intelligence was not a social asset, particularly in the case of nationally planned economies. National planning, [End Page 59] Keynes reasoned, had embraced the faulty proposition that the state's involvement in the economy needed to proceed by refining technologies of representation, by deciding how successfully to personify and so represent collective agency, by deciding how a board, a president, or even an entire government might think and plan for the larger totalities they represented. Keynes, however, argued that there had been "a fundamental misunderstanding of how . . . the economy in which we live actually works," and maintained that personifying groups did not address the fact that there was no way for groups, or the persons they were made to resemble, to intend the economies they comprised. ⁴³

Moreover, Keynes maintained that like individual persons and collectivities, government had no significant intentional agency in matters of economy. ⁴⁴ The organic complexity of economies meant that no government plan, however comprehensive, could anticipate or account for economic contingencies as they developed. Keynes would argue, for example, that a traditional actuarial calculus could never accurately measure probability in questions of macro-economics--the government, for example, could never foresee exactly how many unemployed would need each month to claim unemployment benefits from the Social Security Administration. ⁴⁵ Thus he argued that continual regulation of fiscal and monetary policy was necessary because the international nature of the modern economy guaranteed that government could never anticipate or stabilize the contexts in which it would execute its plans. In fact, Keynes saw the controlled circulation of money as the consummate means of addressing the inherently uncertain nature of modern economies, writing with emphasis that "the importance of money essentially flows from its being a link between the present and the future" (GT, 293). Thus while governments did not know what was done with the money they regulated, money remained one of the only traceable lineaments connecting governmental actions and their outcomes.

The legislators of the world, acknowledged and unacknowledged both, were retrenching, for the 1930s and 1940s would find Stevens fascinated with these same issues, such that he could claim, for example, to be interested in what he called "up to date capitalism" (L, 292), a claim that might begin to explain his famously cryptic proclamation that "Money is a kind of poetry" ("A," 191). ⁴⁶ This assertion seems to find Keynesian explanation in "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating," as well as in Owl's Clover, where the injunction "To live incessantly in change" is enabled by the command "turn / Your backs upon the vivid statue." ⁴⁷ Stevens would in fact take this opposition into the concluding cantos of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), where he contrasts the civic aggressions of an architect and sculptor who "builds capitols" and "establishes statues of reasonable men" to the intrinsically poetic song of a robin. ⁴⁸ Whereas the sculptor attempts to impose an artifactual order of his own making on a public world, the robin produces art in the simple process of singing. In this way the public circulation of money that funds the sculptor is transformed into a poetic commitment to circulation as such, for the robin's songs [End Page 60]

. . . at least comprise
An occupation, an exercise, a work,

A thing final in itself and, therefore, good:
One of the vast repetitions final in
Themselves and, therefore, good, the going round

And round and round, the merely going round,
Until merely going round is a final good . . .

["NT," 405].

Here, then, is one context in which to understand the poem's edict "It Must Change" ("NT," 389). Poetry--like an act of establishing, but unlike the statue that is finally established--is thus conceived of as "[a]n occupation, an exercise, a work."

The idea that circulation could itself become an aesthetic value was far from the mind of a writer like Anzia Yezierska when she declared of her experience on the Federal Writers' Project that "every day it became harder to blind ourselves to the cold fact that we, like the privy-builders and road-makers of other public projects, were being paid, not for what we did, but to put money into circulation." ⁴⁹ Yezierska, the author of successful novels that had become still more lucrative when they were made into films, refused to imagine herself a wage laborer. Stevens, however, would cannily suggest that the commitment to producing a literary artifact (as opposed to simply circulating) opened one up to precisely the uncertainty both he and the Writers' Project were committed to protecting against. Owl's Clover, for example, does more than simply relocate poetic value from the artifact to a process of making--it associates the fixity of the statue with the inevitable uncertainty of how others respond to it. Richard Wright, veteran of the Writers' Project, claims that he doesn't care if either critics or consumers decide whether "Native Son is a good book or a bad book" because "the mere writing of it will be more fun and a deeper satisfaction than any praise or blame from anybody" (N, 540). Hence Wright, dubbing writing "a significant kind of living" (N, 535), absolves writing from the unpredictability of consumption in much the same way that Keynesian theory, committed to the ongoing regulation of monetary and fiscal policy, absolves governments from having to anticipate future economic contingencies. Indeed neither author nor government could anticipate the whims of the consumer. Thus whereas the second stanza of Owl's Clover begins, "So much the sculptor had foreseen," the third stanza represents a consumer of the statue that the sculptor "had not foreseen," in this way explaining why poetry might want to hypostatize the regulated circulation of money and commit to the trope of continuous labor. ⁵⁰

But Keynesian economics provides more than an homology for Stevens's substitution of a "going round // And round and round" for artifactual art, for Keynes would argue as early as 1936 that government spending on the arts was an ideal way [End Page 61] to put federal money into public circulation. Keynes was in fact the first head of Britain's Council for the Encouragement of Music and Arts, established in 1941, and later founded and ran the British Arts Council. Like the New Deal's Arts Projects, both organizations would work to implement his claim, made in 1936, that the performative arts in particular were ideal recipients of government spending. In "Art and the State," Keynes reasons that

Even more important than the permanent monuments of dignity and beauty in which each generation should express its spirit to stand for it in the procession of time are the ephemeral ceremonies, shows and entertainments in which the common man can take delight . . . and which can make him feel, as nothing else can, that he is one with, and part of, a community, finer, more gifted, more splendid, more care-free, than he can be by himself. ⁵¹

It was of course the aim of Keynesian economics to demonstrate that this hypothetical common man could not meaningfully imagine himself part of a community able to affect the economy. But if collective agency was dead, the common man might receive art in its stead. The artist, Keynes reasons, in need of "economic security and enough income" ("AS," 372), would thus become the "servant of the public" ("AS," 372), an expressive vehicle for what by his own account cited above was a mostly fictive "spirit" ("AS," 374), when his art was at its most "ephemeral" ("AS," 374). Artists, as well as "architects and engineers," might in this way "embody the various imagination . . . of peaceful and satisfied spirits" ("AS," 374). The reflexive and placating moment of performance, he declared, was "an immortal function of the state, an art of government regarded at most times as essential" ("AS," 373). ⁵²

3.

"Whose spirit is this?" asks the speaker of "The Idea of Order at Key West" as he and a companion observe a singing woman walking by the side of a raging sea, and become interested in the relation between her song and the sea's motions. ⁵³ Does the singer orchestrate the sea with her voice, or is she a more passive poetic device, an objective correlative meant to "embody the various imagination . . . of peaceful and satisfied spirits"? Or is the raging sea an entirely natural force, beyond the control of any imagination?

However these questions are answered, it is clear that the poem, in its relentless quest to locate the origins of order and in its opposition, fundamental to modern political theory, between the natural and the social, speaks in potentially expansive registers. "Order has to be created," Keynes insisted, "It is not natural." ⁵⁴ There was, he maintained, no systemic genius; laissez-faire could in the end lead only to what "The Idea of Order at Key West"--seeming to compare waves to stockmarkets--will call "meaningless plungings" ("IO," 129). Stevens raises the possibility of such analogies when he notes on the jacket cover of Ideas of Order that "We think of changes [End Page 62] occurring today as economic changes, involving political and social changes. Such changes raise questions of political and social order." "[I]t is inevitable" he continues, "that a poet should be concerned with such questions." ⁵⁵

If Ideas of Order reveals this concern, then the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" does so even more pointedly. The year Stevens wrote the poem, 1934, saw the high-water mark in a federal and state publicity campaign that held Key West up as the perfect encapsulation of the early New Deal. The Roosevelt Administration lauded Key West as "an illustration" and "model" of the goals of its work-relief programs; the town was declared "New Deal Town" as newspapers across the country followed Roosevelt's lead in associating the isolated island with the possibilities of a federally orchestrated economic recovery. ⁵⁶ Liberal intellectuals were just as sanguine. "In that isolated microcosm you could study the whole issue of disinterested collective planning versus interested private enterprise," writes Elmer Davis of Key West in 1935. This leads him to conclude with grandeur that Key West had become nothing less than "the New Deal in miniature." ⁵⁷

This was the case, Davis reasoned, because "City and county had surrendered their powers, via the Governor, to experts from Washington backed by Federal funds" in their efforts to rebuild Key West after it was devastated by a hurricane in 1934 ("NW," 641). By July 1934, Julius Stone, the ranking Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) officer in Florida, had assumed control of the town and began disbursing the $935,000 the FERA would spend on the now-stranded island in its first year alone.

But for Davis, Federal Relief had done more than save Key West; it had transformed it into something of an intellectual hot-house: "It was Greenwich Village, Montparnasse, Provincetown--on a little tropical island" ("NW," 648). The hot topics, however, were not those that had characterized other centers of modernist bohemia; Davis claims that "groups of men and women" would sit up "till two A. M. discussing problems of administrative technique, and having as good a time as they would have had at the nightclubs" ("NW," 649). "The dominant interest," Davis explains of these discussions, was "the application--however hampered and unsuccessful--of the trained and disinterested intelligence to the problems of collective welfare" ("NW," 649). This celebration of "administrative technique" and those "disinterested intelligences" who would perfect it is cause for suspicion as well as for marvel, for Davis laments that if the New Deal "had got started earlier, the rehabilitation of Key West would have been a really collective enterprise; now it cannot help looking to many people like something imposed by outside authority" ("NW," 650). Thus we are left, Davis concludes, with "a picture of a group of intelligent men and women applying their intelligence (under whatever handicaps, with however limited success) to the problems of a community which could not save itself" ("NW," 652).

The imposition of order "by outside authority" on a "community which could not save itself" speaks directly to "The Idea of Order at Key West"'s organizing question--"Whose spirit is this?" But it is the opposition Davis sets up between the civic planning of administrative experts and a planning that might "have been a really collective [End Page 63] enterprise" that speaks most directly to the poem, which is meant precisely to moot the opposition between these two alternatives, both of which presume that human agents impose order on the world through constructive imaginative acts. Key West was the New Deal in miniature for Stevens as well as for Davis, but the insurance executive saw what the future head of the Office of War Information did not, namely that welfare government would be felt most powerfully not in the worlds it built, but in the provisions it made for its inevitable failure to secure those worlds from the hazards of the unforeseen.

"The Idea of Order" is most explicitly about the difficulty of discerning, let alone controlling, the causes of events. The lines of influence between woman and sea are next to impossible to discern, as when the speaker notes that "The song and water were not medleyed sound / Even if what she sang was what she heard, / Since what she sang was uttered word by word" ("IO," 128). Amid the qualification, the words seem to utter themselves, lending force to the ambiguous phrase at the beginning of the stanza, "No more was she" ("IO," 128).

But if this phrase suggests the irrelevance of the individual agent in the face of sublime, natural forces, the speaker's desire to know "Whose spirit is this?" continually searches for an intentional agent as the source of what he sees. The relentless personification in the poem is perhaps the most telling sign of the speaker's efforts to locate this agency. The sea is produced as a personification ("the ever-hooded, tragic gestured sea" ["IO," 129] has a "genius" ["IO," 128], a "body" ["IO," 128], "sleeves" ["IO," 128], and a "dark voice"["IO," 129]) precisely so the speaker can treat it as a potentially intentional agent equal to the singer. Genius and body, however, are not interchangeable aspects of personhood; rather, the former designates the capacity to control and direct the latter. Thus the sea is least like an intentional agent when the speaker notes that "the water never formed to mind or voice, / Like a body wholly body" ("IO," 128).

Similar mind-body dualisms pervade Stevens's writing: the possibility that a genius or spirit--like Lippmann's phantom or Rand's society, an "organism that possesses no physical form"--might transcend and intend an otherwise inhibiting physical world is wholly consonant with the utopic vision in "Insurance and Social Change" of a "perfect insurance" under whose aegis all wishes instantly become reality. More specifically, in "Surety and Fidelity Claims" (1938), his only other surviving essay on insurance, Stevens imagines an insurance agent whose body vanishes into his work as a result of his ability to guarantee plans: the surety agent, who provides bonds guaranteeing the fulfillment of contracts, "finds it difficult sometimes to distinguish himself from the papers he handles and comes almost to believe that he and his papers constitute a single creature, consisting principally of hands and eyes: lots of hands and lots of eyes." ⁵⁸ As pure interpersonal, communicative facility (with hands, eyes, and a body of text), Stevens's agent guarantees the elimination of chance and the fulfillment of contract by dispossessing himself of the bulk of his body. This is the panacea of national planning: a vision of the private imagination gone public, [End Page 64] the beginnings of a truly collective agency enabled by minds acting and thinking together in spite of all physical demarcation.

It is, however, a panacea "The Idea of Order" will dismiss. The fourth stanza in particular makes clear that the difficulty of the question "Whose spirit is this?" is that bodies and voices designate the only recognizable markers of human identity and agency. Lippmann's public and Keynes's spirits are in the end impotently passive precisely because they are abstract entities. Likewise for Stevens, if spirit is completely disembodied, it becomes invisible and potentially manifold, difficult to identify and understand as a coherent intentional force. In the fourth stanza the speaker is thus unable to locate any origin for the cacophony of voices he hears--without any one body, spirit seems to transcend the sum of its sources:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that . . .

["IO," 129]

What first promised to be a poetic event caused by one intentional agent goes on to emerge as a sublime and agentless natural event; "meaningless plungings" and "bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons" ("IO," 129) overcome the speaker in all their accidental grandeur, overwhelming his efforts to imagine one mind capable of serving as a cause for the tumult before him.

What follows at first seems a typical compensatory gesture designed to consolidate the autonomy and cognitive powers of the isolate and intentional mind. Almost inexplicably, the speaker now appears to accord the singer her constructive powers:

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

["IO," 129-30]

At first glance, these assertions seem successfully to mitigate the sublime excess to which the speaker just bore witness. Yet this is at best an ambivalent moment of compensation, [End Page 65] for it insists upon the necessarily hermetic nature of the imaginative powers conceded the singer. The seemingly definitive claim "She was the single artificer of the world" is qualified by the enjambed phrase "In which she sang," suggesting that the world in which the singer sings is not necessarily the same as the world in which the speaker moves. The claim made in the stanza's final two lines similarly allows a world-constructing agency at the moment that it signals the singer's potential alienation by qualifying the parameters of her world. Indeed the qualifying "for her" looms large in a line that sets off the claim for world-making with the assertion of the social "we" speaking the poem: "Then we, / As we beheld her striding there alone, / Knew" (emphasis added). ⁵⁹

The speaker does not know, however, who or what makes the order in the town, which stands in marked contrast to the natural setting of the first half of the poem. The singer having concluded her song, the speaker wants to know

Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town . . .
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

["IO," 130]

Still searching for an agent--still, that is, unable to answer the question "Whose spirit is this?"--the speaker tentatively attributes agency to synthetic as opposed to natural phenomena, such that "the lights in the fishing boats" have "Mastered the night and portioned out the sea."

The rationalized and geometric nature of the civic displaces as well an expressive privacy that stands in opposition to the public of two that observes the singer. Subject to the sustained critical observation of two male viewers, it is her mind, not her body, that most forcefully registers the singer's isolation from the social, and her concomitant intimacy with the natural. Throughout the 1930s Stevens would dissociate the intentional mind from public order--he writes in "Adagia" that "The poet represents the mind in the act of defending us against itself" ("A," 199; emphasis added). After noting that "The mind is not equal to the demands of oratory, poetry etc." ("A," 200), he goes on to declare that "Poetry is a cure of the mind" ("A," 201). Hence the prevalent critical conviction that in Stevens the mind is most suspect when it seeks to realize itself in a publicly apprehensible reality. ⁶⁰ Poetry did not, as Frost's Tityrus suggests it should, rescue the private imagination from the public sphere so much as it rescued collective groups of persons existing in a public sphere from their commitment to the private imagination, and from their corollary belief that they could make life secure by somehow realizing in a social domain the worlds they collectively imagined.

The fifth stanza therefore concludes by confirming the incompatibility of the singer's song with the world to which the speaker and his companion return in the [End Page 66] last stanza of the poem, a public world in which lights on fishing boats are the only identifiable traces of an agency that now, more than ever, seems to have no identifiable source. "Turning," in what looks to promise a quintessentially modernist act of poetic conversion, "Toward the town" ("IO," 130), the speaker turns toward a public sphere dominated by bodies open to experience but unable to direct the course of their world. Rather than getting rid of bodies, Stevens gets rid of minds; here too "People take the place of thoughts." It is not until the cryptic emergence of "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" ("IO," 130) in the poem's last line that we begin to understand what this conversion promises.

4.

In his landmark essay "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (1939), the linguist Benjamin Whorf proposes that hearing is the most notable of those "nonspatial" perceptions that are rendered "spatial" by "linguistic metaphorical system[s]." ⁶¹ This linguistic production of order is at times a risky business, for it contributes to "behavior evincing a false sense of security or an assumption that all will always go smoothly, and a lack of foreseeing and protecting ourselves against hazards" (LT, 154). The "indifference to the unexpectedness of life" (LT, 154) built into Standard Average European language groups motivates the essay, committed as it is to demonstrating that specified language patterns form the bedrock upon which individuals build their perceptual abilities and ultimately their behavior. ⁶²

Whorf's first ideas on this topic were formed, he claimed, while working "in a field usually considered remote from linguistics" (LT, 135). That field was insurance, and the insurance company for which Whorf worked was Stevens's, the Hartford Fire and Indemnity Company. Whorf consequently published the findings that formed the basis for "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" in The Hartford Agent, the house journal that first carried Stevens's "Insurance and Social Change." In fact, it was while Stevens was vice president of Hartford that Whorf conducted experiments in how different phrases on fire-warning labels enabled individuals to perceive danger. Individuals anticipated future danger, Whorf insisted, through language, specifically through highly specified language patterns. Correctly phrased labels, reasoned Whorf, might thus key the individual into a perceptual mode adequate to the situation at hand, a mode meant to register the ghostly presence of risks that are themselves only fictions of the potential, inductions from past events. The warning label, then, was seen to function in a manner strikingly similar to the way the insurance company's proliferation of risk groups keyed individuals into potential dangers of which they were previously unaware; a person informed he is part of a given risk group, for example, will discover danger in actions and behaviors once thought to be harmless.

If warning labels represented one way specialized language systems enabled individuals to discover hazard in the world around them, Whorf reasoned that poetry was [End Page 67] another (LT, 260). Stevens--still Whorf's boss when he made this suggestion--was of course himself concerned throughout his poetic career with how poetic language enabled individuals to refine their perceptions of an impersonal world they could not control. "Esthétique du Mal" (1944), for example, is an attempt to generate an apparatus of perception for danger and pain in a world that has come to think of both in abstract and impersonal terms. "Life is a bitter aspic," the poem insists. "We are not at the center of a diamond." ⁶³ Thus the third-person conditional claim in the poem "That he might suffer or that / He might die" is met with the compensatory suggestion that poetry might do more than simply smooth the edges of looming suffering and death. ⁶⁴ Poetry, Stevens would claim in poem after poem, addressed the reality of pain and suffering by enhancing empirical perception; it was, he claimed in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" (1937), "A composing of senses." ⁶⁵

"The Idea of Order" ends with just such a composing of senses, with the cryptic emergence of "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds" from "[t]he maker's rage to order words of the sea" ("IO," 130). That the poem's demarcations have been ghostly throughout hardly needs reinforcing; moving from sea to town, the speaker remains unable to distinguish cause from effect. What is significant, however, is the insistence that "keener sounds" emerge precisely in his inability to distinguish between the two. Only in giving up the search for the origin and source of effects, the line suggests, do individuals begin to experience these same effects with heightened acuity, with an enhanced ability to distinguish, to refine, to classify. "Keener sounds" is in this respect the poem's true compensatory offering, a tendering of Whorfian logic--that poems, like all language systems, guard against chance by producing the awareness of risks--in the wake of the speaker's realization that he cannot locate the ultimate source of any order, either natural or synthetic.

But then who creates the order that does organize the town at the close of "The Idea of Order at Key West"? Who is the maker of which the final stanza speaks? Is he or she what Stevens calls elsewhere "a separate author, a different poet, / An accretion from ourselves, intelligent / Beyond intelligence, an artificial man"? ⁶⁶ Is this "separate author" the "personality of the first plane" Stevens speaks of in "Insurance and Social Change"? Whorf would refer the ability of this personality to act "without stopping to think"--Stevens's essay is published in the company journal just two years earlier--to his efforts to personify language as a mass mind that legislated the actions of individuals. "It is as if the personal mind," he argues, "which selects words but is largely oblivious to pattern, were in the grip of a higher, far more intellectual mind, which has very little notion of houses and beds and soup kettles, but can systematize and mathematize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached" (LT, 257).

What matters most in "The Idea of Order" however is the simple fact that no human being within the poem can be this kind of separate author or different poet. Most of all, the author of the poem itself does not qualify. "[T]here are words / Better without an author, without a poet," Stevens writes in "The Creations of Sounds" [End Page 68] (1944). ⁶⁷ Throughout his career Stevens would suggest that--like the solitary singer who cannot definitively be said to order her world--not even the poet could experience the meaning of the poem as willed or intended. Stevens notes in "Adagia" at this time that "a poem is like a natural object" ("A," 205) and that "It is not every day that the world arranges itself in a poem" ("A," 191). Thus Stevens invents the quintessential mystification of poetic authority, a mystification that formalizes the refusal of intentional agency thematized in "The Idea of Order" itself. "Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind," he writes; "It has to be a revelation of nature" ("A," 191). ⁶⁸

By the seventh stanza of the poem, then, the frames collapse even the poet into an all-inclusive population marked by the impotency of the mind: "the maker's rage to order words of the sea" offers knowledge "of ourselves and of our origins" ("IO," 130) at the precise moment that the referent for "ourselves" and "maker" is expansively inclusive. The speaker, like those around him, like the poet himself, does not personally intend or otherwise cause the aggregation of this collectivity; in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens, in the process of rejecting public statuary in favor of continuous song, explains that this is the gift of public experience, "To discover an order . . . to find, / Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all" ("NT," 404). Indeed membership in this population group is defined by all those things individuals cannot impose upon the future, and by these criteria, the reader, like the author, is as much a member as any character in the poem.

But what exactly does it mean to claim that the poem itself has no maker? Stevens's poetry after the New Deal, as well as the New Critical theory his poetry was so influential in establishing, would answer this question head-on. His poetry staged the incapacity of intentional agency, and he maintained that their making and reception rehearsed the same: "The basis of criticism is not . . . the hidden intention of the writer" (L, 390), he writes in 1941. It would remain for the New Critics to theorize this quintessentially New Deal disavowal: "The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's," note W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley in "The Intentional Fallacy"; "it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it." ⁶⁹ Here again we see the insistence that poetry and criticism address themselves to the abdication of control, to the fatuity of the intentional. ⁷⁰ Control and intention certainly are not recouped in Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Affective Fallacy," where the two make clear that the reader does not determine or cause the poem any more than the poet or critic. This seems to leave a vacuum: exactly who does intend or control the poem; exactly who is the maker of a poem? Having disqualified all the individual sources of agency that might make claim to that office, Wimsatt and Beardsley move, in a by now familiar fashion, to the necessarily impersonal mechanism of the public itself, claiming that "the poem belongs to the public." ⁷¹ What that public could finally be, and how a poem could actually belong to it, remains a concern, a question of literary theory on the one hand, and federal funding for the arts on the other. [End Page 69]

Michael Szalay, currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Michigan, is also a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. He is now finishing his book New Deal Modernism, which is about the relation between aesthetic and political forms of organization during the rise of the welfare state.

Notes

My thanks to Frances Ferguson, Allen Grossman, Walter Michaels, Jennifer Ashton, and Mark McGurl for their invaluable contributions to this essay.

1. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Annual Message to the Congress," in The Court Disapproves, vol. 4 of The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (New York: Russell and Russell, 1938-50), 17.

2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Presidential Statement upon Signing the Social Security Act," in The Court Disapproves, 324.

3. Ibid.

4. Wallace Stevens, "Insurance and Social Change," in his Opus Posthumous, rev. ed. (New York: Knopf Publishers, 1989), 233; hereafter abreviated "ISC."

5. Wallace Stevens, "Adagia," in Opus Posthumous, 193; hereafter abbreviated "A."

6. Stanley Burnshaw, "Turmoil in the Middle Ground," New Masses, 1 October 1935, 41-42.

7. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Scribners, 1938), ix. Stevens's poetry had been understood in these terms since at least the publication of Harmonium (1923): in 1925 Gorham Munson argued that Stevens's poetry ignored the disturbing side of life, prefiguring a line of criticism given its strongest expression in Yvor Winters, who sees Stevens's poetry as prim and hedonistic, an esthete's imaginative haven from the prosaic vagaries of life. Ransom, Munson, and Winters in this manner each deride a poetry fundamentally antagonistic to the social and the civic, and grant Stevens his poetic security only by sequestering his poetry from the reality that groups of persons collectively shared. See Gorham Munson, "The Dandyism of Wallace Stevens," Dial 79 (November 1925): 413-17; and Yvor Winters, "Wallace Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress," reprinted in In Defense of Reason (Denver: Alan Swallow), 431-59.

8. Wallace Stevens, "The Irrational Element in Poetry," in Opus Posthumous, 229.

9. The Essential Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ed. John Gabriel Hunt (New York: Random House, 1995), 96; hereafter abbreviated FDR. Stevens parodies marxist attempts to plan the future when he has a Burnshaw-styled ideologue declare, "Everything is dead / Except the future" in the first stanza of "Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue" (Stevens, Opus Posthumous, 78).

10. Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Common Law, ed. Mark DeWolf Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), 76.

11. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 44; hereafter abbreviated CF. For other work concerned with the relation between class politics and literature during the 1930s, see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York: Avon, 1952); Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-1939 (New York: St. Martins, 1986); Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); James D. Bloom, Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Alan Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right: Wallace Stevens, The Thirties, and Literary Radicalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U. S. Proletarian Fictions, 1929-1941 (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

12. John Dos Passos, "The Writer as Technician," in American Writers' Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International Publishers Co., 1935), 79.

13. Richard Wright, "Personalism" (1935), unpublished manuscript, Richard Wright papers, Schomberg Library, New York.

14. Richard Wright, Native Son and "How Bigger Was Born" (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 535; hereafter abbreviated N. See Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers' Project, 1935-1943 (New York: Little Brown, 1972) for an account of the Creative Writers' Project.

15. Robert Frost, "Build Soil, A Political Pastoral," in The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Latham (New York: Henry Holt, 1969), 34; hereafter abbreviated "BS."

16. Stanley Burnshaw recalls that he spent substantial time as an editor of the New Masses in frustrated attempts to decipher Robert Frost's poems, in the hope of discovering exactly what Frost thought of Roosevelt; see Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York: George Braziller, 1986).

17. Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1967), 216.

18. See my "Inviolate Modernism: Stein, Hemingway, Tzara," Modern Language Quarterly 56 (December 1995): 457-85.

19. Of course Frost's Tityrus--like Frost himself--does not imagine there is much difference between working for the state and working for the university: he tells Meliboeus to "Join the United States and join the family-- / But not much in between unless a college" ("BS," 325). "I keep my eye on Congress, Meliboeus," notes Tityrus. "They're in the best position of us all / To know" ("BS," 317).

20. "Provide, Provide," in The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Latham, 307.

21. For a discussion of the pronoun in pastoral, see the introduction to Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: From Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

22. Peter Cosgrove, "Snapshots of the Absolute: Mediamachia in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," American Literature 67 (June 1995): 329. Another critic uses this same antinomy when he describes Stevens responding to Social Security by "redoubl[ing] his rhetorical efforts to establish a private poetic that can reduce the anxiety occasioned by current history" (Joseph Harrington, "Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Insurance," American Literature 67 [1995]: 110). This reading is crucially incorrect for Stevens, as I will show.

23. François Ewald, "Insurance and Risk," in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 203.

24. George Bernard Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1945), 109.

25. For Foucault's work on insurance and Social Security, see "Social Security" and "The Dangerous Individual," in Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988).

26. Burnshaw, "Turmoil in the Middle Ground," 41, 42.

27. "Interview with Stanley Burnshaw," by Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, Wallace Stevens Journal 13 (fall 1989): 113.

28. The Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 293; Wallace Stevens, in The Letters 293; this volume is hereafter abbreviated L.

29. Nicholas Barr, The Economics of the Welfare State (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987), 111.

30. Robert Frost, quoted in Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself, 10.

31. Holmes, The Common Law, 77. In 1936, Jean-Pierre Maxence, mourning France's commitment to the welfare state, and its concomitant distance from the Axis powers, claimed, "While most countries of Europe are being led towards greatness and adventure, our leaders are inviting us to transform France into an insurance company" (Jean-Pierre Maxence, quoted in Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 17).

32. Josephine Herbst, The Rope of Gold (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 158, 33; emphasis in original. More recently, Daniel Defert has insisted that insurance is "a generalizable technology for rationalizing societies[,] . . . a figure of social organization which far transcends the choice which some thinkers are currently putting to us between the alternatives of privatization and nationalization of security systems" (Daniel Defert, "'Popular Life' and Insurance Technology," in The Foucault Effect, ed. Burchell, Gordon, and Miller, 215).

33. Shaw, Everybody's Political What's What, 109, 114.

34. Frank Warren, Liberals and Communism: The Red Decade Revisited (1966; New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 106.

35. Constructing a corporate-liberal alliance with big business, the state looked to stabilize the market by eliminating wasteful competition, ultimately allowing the president to endorse and supervise the cartelization of private industry. For the benchmark account of the NRA, see Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). See also Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1960).

36. Rexford Tugwell, Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts (1933; New York: Arno, 1977) , 189. At this same time Talcott Parsons was asking, "Was 'society' only a conventional abstraction referring to the interaction of concrete individuals who are the sole real components of social existence, or was society a substantive reality to itself--sui generis--apart from the constituent individuals?" (Talcott Parsons, quoted in Howard Brick, "The Reformist Dimension of Talcott Parsons's Early Social Theory," in The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays, ed. Thomas L. Haskell and Richard F. Teichgraeber III [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 375).

37. Tugwell, Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts, 189.

38. Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (1927; New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 67, 67, 93, and 93, respectively. Bruce Robbins has recently noted the "urgency" of confronting Lippmann's claims because he is speaking "from the right" (emphasis in original) (Bruce Robbins, introduction to The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], x). Lippmann's currency during the early New Deal is made clear by Carrol D. Clark, "The Concept of the Public," The Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 13 (March 1933): 311-20. Not incidentally, Clark specifies Habermas's news-center coffee house as an insurance company, citing the maritime insurance center of Lloyd's Coffee House as one of the forerunners in the founding of the public sphere (316 n. 8). See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

39. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Signet, 1957), 953.

40. Ayn Rand, "What is Capitalism," in What is Capitalism (New York: Signet, 1966 ), 7.

41. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (1943; New York: Signet, 1993), 679.

42. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935), 90, 67.

43. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, vol. 7 of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes (1936; Cambridge, U. K.: Macmillan, 1973), 13; hereafter abbreviated GT. From Keynes's perspective, national planning picked up on a faulty premise central to classical economics, namely that personified collectivities directed the course of the economy by entering into contracts with each other. Whereas classical economy was based on the idea that individual agents could never control the consequences of their actions on the economy as a whole, it had nonetheless relocated their agency to abstractions seen to possess the contract-making potential of persons. Thus while individual workers, and even individual unions, might never have the power to set their own wage levels, classical economy nonetheless held that there was a source of collective and intentional agency implicit in an aggregate of individual actions. "Labor" did in fact determine its wages, for the actions of every worker and union constituted the contract into which the abstract personification "labor" was invariably seen to enter. Keynes argued that there was no way to exert this kind of agency in the economy, however the agents themselves were conceived. He insisted that "there may exist no expedient by which labour as a whole can reduce its real wage to a given figure by making revised money bargains with the entrepreneurs" (GT, 13).

44. Alan Brinkley explains that the introduction of Keynesian economics into the New Deal led to the belief that "the industrial economy was too large, too complex, too diverse; no single plan could encompass it all" (Alan Brinkley, "The New Deal and the Idea of the State," in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed. Stephen Fraser and Gary Gerstle, 1989 [Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press], 93). The welfare state emerges most clearly in its contrast with the planned economy; as Robert E. Goddin points out,

The point of welfare state interventions is to remedy unplanned and unwelcome outcomes. The welfare state strives to produce a post-fisc[al] distribution of certain goods and services that is preferable to the pre-fisc[al] one. In a planned economy, by contrast, all outcomes are the outcomes of planning. Not all are necessarily intended or welcome outcomes, to be sure. But correcting planning errors is surely qualitatively different from correcting the market's unplanned perversities [Robert E. Goddin, "Reasons for Welfare: Economic, Sociological, and Political--but Ultimately Moral," in Responsibility, Rights, and Welfare: The Theory of the Welfare State, ed. J. Donald Moon (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 21].

45. For a detailed discussion of the General Theory's relation to uncertainty, see chapter 5 in Athol Fitzgibbons, Keynes's Vision: A New Political Economy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988).

46. See Filreis, Modernism from Left to Right, 68-70, for a discussion of money and banking in Stevens's "Lions in Sweden."

47. Wallace Stevens, Owl's Clover, in Opus Posthumous, 82. James Longenbach also notes that Owl's Clover values the activity of making over the made (Longenbach, "Elizabeth Bishop's Social Conscience," ELH 62 [summer 1995]: 485 n. 20). For an analysis of the relation between Stevens and statuary, see Michael North, "The Noble Rider," in The Final Statue: Public Monuments and Modern Poets (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985).

48. Wallace Stevens, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1955), 403; hereafter abbreviated "NT."

49. Anzia Yezierska, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (New York: Scribners, 1950), 198.

50. Stevens, Owl's Clover, 75, 76.

51. John Maynard Keynes, "Art and the State," part 1, in The Listener, 26 August 1936, 372; hereafter abbreviated "AS."

52. For Keynes's role in the British Arts Council, see Eric White, The Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Davis and Poynter, 1975).

53. Wallace Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West," in Collected Poems, 129; hereafter abreviated "IO."

54. John Maynard Keynes, quoted in Jennifer Wick, "Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf and Keynes and Modern Markets," Novel 28 (fall 1994): 21.

55. Wallace Stevens, "Jacket Statement from Ideas of Order," in Opus Posthumous, 222.

56. The first two quotations are from The New York Times, 30 March 1935; the third is from The Philadelphia Enquirer, 30 March 1935. They are taken from clippings in an untitled notebook held at the Key West Public Library, Key West, Florida.

57. Elmer Davis, "New World Symphony, With a Few Sour Notes," Harpers Magazine 170 (May 1935): 642; hereafter abbreviated "NW."

58. Wallace Stevens, "Surety and Fidelity Claims," in Opus Posthumous, 239.

59. Burnshaw was suspicious of the poem for exactly this reason, and notes that before he wrote his infamous review he began to wonder "which world" it was that the singer actually made ("Interview with Stanley Burnshaw," 124). Harold Bloom sees the song as evidence of Stevens's interest in a transcendental order that is "not our own," but can be located "nowhere else" but in ourselves (Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate [Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press], 101). Despite his avowed interest in the topographical, J. Hillis Miller, like Bloom, has recently located the poem's order in the romantic imagination and voice of the singer, and not in the town toward which the speaker turns (Topographies [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995], 288. For a detailed analysis of Stevens's often hostile interest in romanticism during the 1930s, see Filreis, Modernism from Right to Left, 39-180.

60. Frank Lentricchia makes the same point in The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical Poetics of William Butler Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968); see also Frank Dogget, Wallace Stevens: The Making of a Poem (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Michael North and Walton Litz also make versions of this claim; see North, The Final Statue, 222; and Walton Litz, "Wallace Stevens's Defense of Poetry," in The Romantic and Modern: Revaluations of Literary Tradition, ed. George Bornstein (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).

61. Benjamin Whorf, "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," in his Language, Thought, and Reality, ed. John Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 155; this volume is hereafter abbreviated LT.

62. Citing his mentor Edward Sapir, Whorf claims that "the cue to a certain line of behavior is often given by the analogies of the linguistic formula in which the situation is spoken of, and by which to some degree it is analyzed, classified, and allotted its place in that world which is 'to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group'" (LT, 136). This claim would find its way into college textbooks during the second half of the century, as anthropologists and psychologists debated the validity of a debased "Whorfian Hypothesis," most often simplified into the claim that Eskimos could see distinctions between different kinds of snow that English-language speakers could not, because Eskimos used more words to describe snow. Hence the notoriously post-structuralist conclusion always lurking in Whorf's work: reality is in the end a linguistic construct. In its most simplified version, then, the Whorfian Hypothesis suggests a striking similarity to a simplified but nonetheless critically popular version of Stevens, one that sees the poet committed to the proposition that reality, far from being a fixed constant, is instead constructed by imaginative paradigms hammered out in the forge of poetry.

63. Wallace Stevens, "Esthétique du Mal," in Collected Poems, 322.

64. Ibid.

65. Wallace Stevens, "The Man with the Blue Guitar," in Collected Poems, 168.

66. Wallace Stevens, "The Creations of Sound," in Collected Poems, 311.

67. Ibid., 310.

68. Like a natural object, but not identical to one: Stevens writes to Richard Latimer at the start of 1935 that "while poems may very well occur, they had very much better be caused" (L, 274).

69. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 5.

70. It is therefore Stevens's proto-New Critical dogma, and not his job at Hartford, that leads Gerald Graff to claim that Stevens's poetry protects itself from "referential liabilities," the "risks of assertion" (Gerald Graff, Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma [Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1970], 25).

71. Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," 5.

.