Updating Baudelaire for the Radio Age
Updating Baudelaire for the Radio Age
The Refractive Poetics of “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating”
In Ideas of Order, abstraction becomes Wallace Stevens's mechanism for coping with his desire to be socially engaged while satisfying a much stronger desire to distance his own thinking from the public's thoughts, which Stevens strongly associated with radio. Deliberately emptying his language of content, Stevens arranges poems like “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating” as screens to block or diffuse the associations of his poetic language with the ideas and discourses continuously broadcast over America's airwaves. His poems take up the work of restoring the intersubjective distance between writer and reader that he believed radio had helped to collapse. “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” allegorizes Stevens's response to radio. It articulates his complaint against the circulation of discourse that Stevens could not tune out in the 1930s.
Keywords: Ideas of Order, Wallace Stevens, poetic language, discourse
Florida Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
