ABSTRACT
Stevens' poem expresses a kind of perennial hostility to utopian aspirations. There is too much in the world, it may be thought, for utopia to compete with. For Orwell, the real problems are spiritual. Nothing can give the individual earthly immortality. Nothing readily conceivable can restore the hold of a belief in the afterlife. Dahrendorf points to a recurrent feature in utopian thought, the fixed and uneventful quality of life pictured in it. It is true that unhappiness is far more interesting to write about and read about than is happiness. In any case, the critics of utopia assert the ineluctability of the facts of life, which facts can be subsumed under such categories as human restlessness, the desire for novelty, the need to adapt to the unforeseen, the growth of mind, the disclosure of new possibilities and opportunities, the dialectic of style, and so on.
