American political and literary discourses in the Great War era were infused with revolutionary rhetoric. In 1912, the major-party nominees for president as well as the Socialist candidate, Eugene Debs, promised revolutionary change.In 1914, many initial commentators on the war, whether Vachel Lindsay or radicals of The Masses magazine, recognized its class-war implications. Even as President Wilson led an intervention seeking regime change in Central Europe, the antiwar Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) sought industrial-democratic regime change at home. While the February revolution in Russia was widely applauded by Americans, the November revolution led by the Bolsheviks sharply divided US opinion. Ten Days That Shook the World, by American journalist John Reed, not only defended Lenin’s methods but encouraged their application in the United States. But counterrevolution held the upper hand in the country, as IWW leaders were sentenced to long prison terms and other radical groups were suppressed in the postwar Palmer raids. Upton Sinclair’s novel Jimmie Higgins both deplored the ill-conceived 1918-19 US military intervention against the Bolsheviks and grieved the loss of a legal, parliamentary path to social democracy in the United States.

Chapter 3 argues that Stevens’ imaginative compositions of collectivity and audience provide another vantage point from which to highlight the contextual dimensions of his poetics of autonomy. In his longest and most intricate poem, “Owl’s Clover,” Stevens explores both the potentials and limits of aesthetic separation and autonomy for imagining new forms of collective agency, including the working classes. This exploration unfolds in tension with the period’s political-artistic aspirations to the inclusive “rhetoric of the people.” Stevens’ search for an inclusive “common” or “civil fiction” leads to a complex questioning of the imagination’s potential to expand from a local to a global vision of collectivity. The chapter demonstrates how by acknowledging the ideological pressures (fascist war and colonialism) that impede the aesthetic creation of a globally inclusive model of communal presence, Stevens takes the further step of resisting them, to affirm the continual need of poetry for envisaging prospective forms of collective life.