ABSTRACT
The critical literature written about Wallace Stevens for over half a century now offers little that could be understood as providing a "gay reading" of the poet or his work-this despite the fact that it is remarkably easy to view Stevens in a purple light, easy, that is, at the very least, to see him in terms of a fin-de-siecle aestheticism evocative of a culturally identified "decadence" inseparable from associations with sexual irregularity. As early as 1924, after all, Stevens' poetry could be described in the highly charged language of self-conscious perversity and artifice that characterizes the following passage from a review of Harmonium:
Eight years later another reviewer, foregoing such gorgeously elaborated syntax, proposed a similar reading of Stevens by describing him more concisely as "a very Proust of poets,,2; in 1935 Ronald Lane Latimer suggested a relationship between Stevens' poetry and the work of Ronald Firbank, leading Stevens to acknowledge that he had read Firbank's novels, although he insisted that he had "long since sent the lot of them to the attic,,3; and as late as 1953, only two years before the poet's death, William Empson raised once more the question of Steven's literary and intellectual brotherhood when he proposed that "Mr. Wallace Stevens, very well-to-do it appears, and growing up in the hey-day of Oscar Wilde, was perhaps more influenced by him than by Whitman.,,4
I cite these comments, on the one hand, to evoke the way in which Stevens, virtually from the outset of his public poetic career, was defined in relation to a literary culture already associated-more or less explicitly-with homosexuality; but I cite them, on the other hand, to indicate by synecdoche the sort of analysis
that this essay will not endeavor to produce. Instead of engaging the question of a "gay style" or a "gay aesthetic," I want to consider in the following pages some ways in which a gay reading practice that attends to the social inscriptions of ideology can make visible certain definitive stresses inhabiting our culture's textsstresses that might seem to have little relation to what our critical institutions continue to define as the narrowly specialized (i.e., insignificant) concerns of gay men and lesbians. I plan to proceed with that consideration by examining some strategies by which literary criticism in particular attempts to evade, contain, or dismiss what it tendentiously-and defensively-construes as "the homosexual"; I will refer to Stevens' poetry, therefore, not primarily as a body of texts through which to trace the workings of a deeply embedded (hetero)sexual ideology, but more obliquely as an instrument of analytic leverage that can help to articulate a critique of those gestures whereby criticism refuses or denies its own positioning within a framework that a gay theory might enable us to read.
