Owl’s Clover by Wallace Stevens
(Vintage, 1989)
OWL’S CLOVER, Steven’s third collection of verse after HARMONIUM
(1923) and IDEAS OF ORDER (1935) does not appear in his COLLECTED
POEMS, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954, the year before his death. The long poem is palpably a forced
political and poetical self-defense by a non-political poet. The prime location of OWL’S CLOVER since Stevens’s demise is OPUS POSTHUMOUS, which also contains the poet’s unpublished and uncollected writings, without which the Stevens scholar would miss peripheral influences on the complete works.
The chief reason Stevens withheld OWL’S CLOVER from his final collection was that he felt goaded into slim volume by the savage criticism of his previous work as far too gaudy and politically indifferent to poetry’s role in the depths of the Depression. In start contrast to the cornucopia of colorful images and figurative panache acclaimed in HARMONIUM, with its sensual delight and even dandyism, OWL’S CLOVER mounts a drab defense of the politics of order against the heady Marxian dialectics of the day. Stevens may capture a political mood in a descriptive phrase, but even in his so-called war poems in other volumes, he shows meager talent for direct engagement with practical ideas,
OWL’S CLOVER is at best inferentially political in the broad sense of the term. It runs five discrete poems to a length of 860 lines: The Old Woman and the Statue pits the suffering poor versus a public, noble, but ignored symbol of art and order. Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue, the second poem, rejects Marxian visions imposed on organic development. The Greenest Continent links the Dark Continent with the dark human unconsciousness to rebuff dialectical fancies. A Duck for Dinner employs a grab bag of images from American history, but lands squarely on Emersonian individuality, from which Stevens rarely departs. Somber Figuration seems the most compelling poem in the group because it is more psychological than political. Stevens ventures into the inner self of the “subman,” an equivalent to Carl Jung’s world of the collective unconscious, although Stevens sees its potency as the imagination. The connection between the subman, the man below the man, seems the signal idea in OWL’S CLOVER. The parallel links Stevens’s poetry with Jungian depth theories and offers a new avenue of archetypal interpretation to Stevens’s entire canon.