ABSTRACT
It has been several decades since the privacy, interiority and abstraction of Wallace Stevens's poetry have seemed to be its defining features. Although it can be tempting to link Stevens's work at a private insurance company to the public insurance programs of the New Deal, in fact his specific field, corporate suretyship, correlates more closely with the financialization of the credit economy at the start of the twentieth century. The implications for society at large are clear. Social technologies like corporate suretyship can foster exciting new social dynamics that leave ever greater room for individual action, but in due course they give rise to more damaged and deformed individuals too. In moving from the 'drastic community' to the 'singular creature', from the flock to the monster, one can see that the conditions of corporate suretyship produce not just new kinds of highly individualistic societies, but also new kinds of plural selves.
