"Where / Do I begin and end?": Circular imagery in the revolutionary poetics of Wallace Stevens and W. B. Yeats

Journal article

The “fascination with geometric forms,” Miranda B. Hickman observes, “provided many modern writers with a language through which to imagine and articulate their ideals” (xiii). This article accordingly investigates the circular imagery in Wallace Stevens’s and W. B. Yeats’s poetry, arguing that both men’s use of the circle as a recurring poetic image should be read together as reflecting their opposing political ideologies. I examine Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and A Vision, and Stevens’ “Connoisseur of Chaos,” “The Sail of Ulysses,” “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, as these poems contain some of the most famous circle imagery within Yeats’s and Stevens’s work.

Both Yeats and Stevens turn to the circle as an ordering structure when faced with the political crises of modernity, including the chaos provoked by Anglo-Irish conflict and two World Wars. Joseph Frank explains this shared move by arguing that when “the external world is an incomprehensible chaos” and its artists feel unable to “take pleasure in depicting this world in their art,” they might instead turn to “linear-geometric forms” that “have the stability, the harmony” for which they yearn (54). Whether we read Yeats’s and Stevens’s turn to the circle as part of the psychological response that Frank propounds, or as Stevens’s conscious reworking of Yeats’s established high modernist move, an exploration of Yeats’s and Stevens’s use of the circle image reveals a fascinating counterpointed relationship between their respective political beliefs. Caroline Levine instructively laments that the literary critic has “typically treated aesthetic and political arrangements as separate,” despite the fact that in “sorting out what goes where, the work of political power often involves enforcing restrictive containers and boundaries […] In other words, politics involves activities of ordering, patterning, and shaping” (3). Similarly, Yeats’s fondness for and Stevens’s resistance to the universalising circular structure mirrors their differing early political ideals.

Authors: Simpson, H

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Journal: Wallace Stevens Journal
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 46-61
• Publication date: 2018-03-01
• Acceptance date: 2017-12-10
• DOI: 10.1353/wsj.2018.0004
• ISSN: 0148-7132