Wallace Stevens, Communism, and the Artistic Imagination

In his lectures and poetry across pre- and postwar America, Wallace Stevens evinced an increasingly fervent anti-communist stance. In several seminal poems, including “A Duck for Dinner,” “A Dish of Peaches in Russia,” “Description without Place,” and “Mountains Covered with Cats,” Stevens addressed aspects of life in the Soviet Union, as well as what he perceived to be communism’s assault upon the creative imagination. For Stevens, this strident political position was in keeping with North American sentiments at the time. As Samuel French Morse remembers, Stevens “was very conservative, essentially. Eisenhower was his man, not Stevenson.” In fact, unlike many other Americans, Stevens had simply remained conservative all along—throughout the Depression, the second World War, and their respective aftermaths. By the 1950s, America’s imagination—and its anti-communist sentiments—had merely caught up with Stevens’s. Indeed, as the 1950s progressed, America’s hysteria began to manifest itself in “the red scare” and the witch hunts of blacklisting and McCarthyism. As his poetry during this era demonstrates, Stevens remained deeply concerned about communism’s potential for infiltrating American life and shifting the course of postwar society.