“Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s Figurations of Masculinity

Abstract

In a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane Latimer, Wallace Stevens makes a rare direct mention of pastoral. Although Stevens wrote several early poems with titles such as “Eclogue” (1909), “The Silver Plough Boy” (1915), and “Ploughing on Sunday” (1923), and referred pointedly to poets as “shepherds” in early correspondence, nowhere does he address the topic at any length.¹ In the Latimer letter, Stevens reflects upon whether or not one’s everyday life and poetry might be of a piece, and by way of example cites a study by an art historian that attributes the linearity of Dutch painting to the flat Dutch countryside. Stevens then appears to dismiss the topic, observing: “You know, the truth is that I had hardly interested myself in this (perhaps as another version of pastoral) when I came across some such phrase as this: ‘man’s passionate disorder’, and I have since been very much interested in disorder.”² While the “this” that is the “version of pastoral” has a slightly indeterminate referent, it seems to refer to the very idea of order, that is, the direct correspondences between life and art, the world and the imagination, the poet as man and the poet as creator of a linguistic universe, that intrigued Stevens throughout his career. Despite Stevens’s avowal of disinterest in the topic, it would emerge repeatedly in his poetics as a crucial counterpoint to the very “disorder” he imagined to have displaced it.³