“The Greenest Continent“: Wallace Stevens and Mussolini

( Draft- Version)

In a letter to his publisher, U.S. poet Wallace Stevens supported Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 with the following words:

“(I am pro-Mussolini personally+).” (Letters [L] 289)

+The Italians have as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa-constrictors.” (L 290; as a footnote [+] to the above; Oct 31, 1935)

The invasion had begun on October 3. Another three weeks later, again to Ronald Lane Latimer, Stevens wrote: 

“While it is true that I have spoken sympathetically of Mussolini, all of my sympathies are the other way: with the coons and the boa-constrictors. However, ought I, as a matter of reason, to have sympathized with the Indians as against the Colonists in his country? A man would have to be very thick-skinned not to be conscious of the pathos of Ethiopia or China, or one of these days, if we are not careful, of this country. But that Mussolini is right, practically, has certainly a great deal to be said for it. (L 295; Nov 21, 1935) 

Notice the rhetoric: concession, self- ironic subversion of the concession by equating the coons with the boa-constrictors; second subversion of the concession by an appeal to reason and a historic analogy with the colonization of North America, equating “the Indians” with the Ethiopians. Third weakening of the concession: it could happen to China or the US as well, if we are not careful (an invasion of the USA?); return to the assertion: Mussolini is right, practically. Stevens weighs his arguments, but does not retract his support of the Italian invasion, even in November 1935, when the international reaction and the League of Nation widely condemned the war as an unprovoked aggression. But clearly the tone is less assertive than the October statement.

Clearly still nettled by his publisher‘s questions and the course of the war, Stevens wrote a poem on "Africa," to be included in a sequence titled Owl's Clover. He had planned the sequence as a set of poems on statues (L, 296). 

The poem "The Greenest Continent" was written in January and February 1936, while the war was in the news almost every day. Stevens published it later that year, then revised and abridged the text for another publisher. The abridged version came out in the year after (New York: Knopf, 1937).

While four of the poems in Owl’s Clover have found many interpreters, “The Greenest Continent” clearly proved an embarrassment. Its racist language (Du Rose 1998) and its equivocal support or ridicule of the Fascist invasion in Ethiopia () are two possible reasons for this partial abstention (Filreis). But there may be two even stronger reason for this reticence to deal with this poem: the statue in “The Greenest Continent” seems largely, if not wholly fictitious, a symbol for Europe’s attempt to impose its gods and beliefs on Africa (Du Rose 1998, 16-17). Also the relation of the African statue, if it existed, to the other statues in Owl’s Clover remains rather obscure.

In the following pages I want to provide evidence that Stevens had a specific African statue in mind and that this statue throws a new light on the rest of the poem. In a follow-up article I want to show how this finding may reflect on the rest of the poems, and especially on the two poems framing “The Greenest Continent,” the center piece of the composition of Owl’s Clover.

My thesis is as simple as it is new: the poem meditates a sculpture of Mussolini’s head carved out of a rock near Adowa, a few days after the invasion. The picture of this statue is easily available in Bosworth’s antifascist biography of Mussolini (2002, table).

Let me provide some of the evidence for this. Apart from the comments about Stevens’ political sympathies for Mussolini, we have a detailed commentary of the poems by Stevens in his letters to Hi Simon. The letter date from to 1941, and Stevens had to return to the poems which for him lay five years in the past. Some of the comments he clearly made in hindsight, but generally Stevens is trying to be helpful to Hi Simon as a reader of the poems, although Stevens is much more cautious about revealing his political sympathies than he was with his publisher Lorimer. After all, in 1941 Mussolini joined Hitler in World War II, and Stevens’ attitude of neutrality did no longer seem very adequate for the new situation.

The brief commentaries made to Lorimer in 1936, while writing “The Greenest Continent” may be more pertinent, but they are carefully hedged, and Lorimer would have found it hard to discover any sympathies for Mussolini in them. But taken together, the 1940 commentary and the 1936 commentary throw a revealing light on “The Greenest continent” and its subsequent revision. Both commentaries show how Stevens dislikes to paraphrase his own poetry, and how he carefully protects his sympathies for Mussolini, both in 1936 and in 1940.

Still, much of the commentary is honest and helpful. This is what he tells Lorimer about the title of the poem in 1935. The invasion is into its 2nd month:

"The title refers to the strange mixture of images and symbols [the clover part] with abstract, often political affirmations [the owlish part of the poems]" (L, 311-12; my interpolations).

This is a good example of how Stevens uses words to deflect readers from a hidden meaning, from the properties of the plant (which does not occur in the poem) and the separate symbolic meanings of the two words that only together designate the plant. The title poses an enigma. But if you cut the clover, you reduce the poems to their political statements.

In the following I have reduced the first (unabridged) version of the Africa poem to its more owlish lines:

I. What god rules over Africa?

II. The heaven of Europe is empty. Everything did it.

III. There was a heaven once [in Europe] … The temple of the altar where each man beheld the truth and knew it to be true.

IV. That was never the heaven of Africa, which had no heaven. If the statue rose … the serpent would draw himself across. No god rules over Africa. Death only sits on the serpent’s throne.

V. The angels come. These, Seraphim of Europe? Angels returning after the war with belts and beads … to contemplate time's golden paladin and purpose. 

VI. But could the statue stand in Africa?

VII. The diplomats of the cafés expound: “… it was a mistake to paint the gods. They [the colors] have no place in the sense of colonists, no place in Africa. Why think? The black will still be free to sing, if only a sorrowful song.”

VIII. Fatal Ananke is the common god. He looks upon the statue where it is. He sees the angel in the nigger’s mind. Fateful Ananke is the final god. He is that obdurate ruler who ordains for races, not for men … a changeless element. 

(Opus Posthumous [OP] 52-60; only the words in brackets are my additions.)

The difficulties in the poem arise mainly from the coded images (who or what, for instance, is the "golden paladin"?), to a lesser degree from the changing voices. But the overall argument is very clear. Europe has lost its god, Africa never had one. The European attempt to establish a god (as a statue) in Africa must fail, unless one can find a god common to both. The poet offers Ananke, the changeless image of fate as a god common to Europe and Africa. This argument largely matches with Stevens’ more abstract explanations.

In 1940, Stevens explained to Hi Simons, that, in spite of the many images, the reading of “The Greenest Continent” really could be very easy.

“Your difficulty with this poem is the difficulty of subjugating facts. It is assumed that the South has its own consciousness, its own idea of God, its own imagination (I). The consciousness etc. of the West is delineated (II); the difference between the two is disclosed (III), with some rather crude illustrations (IV); the apparent impossibility of overcoming the difference is stated (V). Yet the poem concludes with what is its point, that if ideas of God are in conflict, the idea of pure poetry: imagination, extended beyond local consciousness, may be an idea to be held in common by South, West, North and East. It would be a beginning, since the heaven of Europe is empty, to recognize Ananke, who, now more than ever, is the world's 'starless crown'." (L, 370)

The images simply “illustrate” the owlish part of the poem: Ethiopia stands for Africa, and Africa stands for the “South,” Italy stand for Europe, and Europe for the “West.” The poet is subjugating images as facts. But we have to bear in mind that this is a commentary written four years after the poem was published. Stevens here abstracts from the reportage of the Ethiopian invasion in 1935/6. He turns the war into a conflict of ideas between West and South, and God into imagination. Also, Stevens explains to Simon the abridged second version published by Knopf, and his reference to “now more than ever” is to August 1940 and to World War II. The concept of Ananke has changed, but still makes sense to him. He thus contradicts the diplomats (who expound that Africans will not think): Ananke "sees the angel in the nigger's mind" and hears the echoes of African songs in European music. Both continents are bound to each other by the inexorable necessity of evolution. They are on different steps of the evolutionary ladder, and the bushman’s song will ultimately turn into a European minuet. The speaker is a Darwinist.

This does not simply mean taking the long view in bringing Africa up to the European achievements in music, statues and imagination. It also means, the poet is trying to provide a rationale for the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia. European colonialism, especially the British and French versions of it, relied on the argument that is was reorganizing parts of Africa. Mussolini used the same rhetoric (Diggins 1972, 290-92). His general de Bono, claimed that Italy was on a civilizing mission in Ethiopia (NYT Index 1936). It was imposing a "new order" on something that was chaos, or in more recent terms a "failed state." (Haile Selassie was its emperor). By glorifying, however ironically, a lord of necessity, and bestowing the "starless crown" on him, the poet also justifies the invasion still under way in February 1936. He takes de Bono’s view.

Ananke is not the idea of “pure poetry,” but of necessity, a Spengler word. Stevens had found the word in 1934 in a letter from Mario Rosi, “an importation from Italy” (L, 370); here he redirects Simon’s reading of the poem, bringing it in line with his convictions in 1940, after he had written “The Man with a Blue Guitar” (1936) and “Asides on the Oboe” (1940). A lot had happened since Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.

In “The Greenest Continent” Stevens is definitely not on the side of Africans or African Americans, who protested against the invasion in the USA (Diggins 1972, 306-12). The language of the poem remains unmistakably racist. The derisive use of term “nigger” in contrast with “angel” shows that. Steven also stereotypes Africans: Ethiopians become “the black,” “the milkiest bowmen” “Africa’s children” etc. He uses the term “race” with an evolutionary meaning. The images illustrating Africa owe more to the world of Tarzan and the popular press than to the history of Abyssinia. And the cliché-ridden images, to which Stevens admits as a problem in writing the poems, do not derive from the blank verse he used (Bates 1985, 188), they also occur in his letters. The "white man in Africa" may be the general subject (L, 308), but it is the central symbolic subject of "The Greenest Continent." The invasion is more than just another parable of poetic imagination. The poem is about "the difficulty of imposing the imagination on those that do not share it" (L, 369).

But Stevens may not be clearly on the side of the Fascist invaders, either. Calling the Italian air force "angels", even "seraphim" and the war a comedy of "guns" versus "milkiest bowmen", a spectacle of "concentric bosh", engraved in a Leonardo-da-Vinci style demonstrates an imagination "flashed with irony" (OP, 56). One critic has read this section as a possible denouncement of the Fascist invasion (Lucas 2001), another has shown that Stevens is simply cautious. His use of the war as a “permissible subject” may come from his insurance practice. There it is a technical term for lawyers working in that profession (Bates 1985, 128, 155). A third critic has taken refuge to irony himself when characterizing this poem:

The effect created by Stevens reads oddly as a kind of comic extravaganza. Also it does not indicate which side he is on himself ... irony against the Italians or simply indecision … The poet concerned with 'Ideas of Order' can be taken in only too easily by impositions of order outside his natural element of art, and an American poet who had celebrated the ex-European Crispin as pioneer and colonist is only too well aware of the irony of being caught sympathizing over-much with the 'coons and boa-constrictors' being colonized.” (Patke 1985, 63)

If Patke’s reading is legitimate - and I agree with it - a series disturbing questions arise. The final Ananke-section serves to justify the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, however ironically ("Be glory to this lord!"), and if the invasion is just a parable of how to impose one's imagination on others who do not share it, then Stevens' imagery of angels and seraphim for the forces of imagination somehow seems to be rather fitting. The angels probably ironically refer to the air-attacks waged by the Fascists on the Ethiopian population, and more specifically to the parachutists dropping from the sky, as they were shown on contemporary propaganda newsreels (you tube). After all, these images occur throughout his poetry of this phase (1930 to 1947). But this very fitting raises the question, in how far Stevens' poetics of the “rage for order” and the "necessary angel" share traits with the fascist ideology of hero worship and forceful expansion by conquest.

This leads to my central question: How does the statue in Africa fit into all this? There might be a very simple answer. Stevens suggested in his letters: the poem is a kind of reportage, in which he tried to apply his own poetry to what he read in the papers (L, 308, 369).

I have used the New York Times Index for 1935 and 1936 to see what Stevens might have read or seen in the news between October 1935 and February 1936 (NYTI 1935 and 1936).

The Fascist invasion began on October 3, 1935, while Stevens was corresponding with his publisher Lorimer. It was a two-pronged invasion, one form he North and one from the South. It is the northern invasion that “the Greenest Continent” is concerned with. The Ethiopian troops had withdrawn from the northern border, and de Bono’s troupes quickly gained Adowa which they turned into a major supply center for the northern campaign. On October the town was formally annexed, the Italian consul re-installed, and a huge portrait of Mussolini placed over the cathedral gate of Adowa (NYTI 1935). This town had a special importance in the Italian historic imaginary: it was the place of a humiliating defeat of Italian forces by the African troupes of Menelik in the year 1896. The statue of Menelik in Adowa celebrating this victory was taken down by Italian forces and transported to Italy.

On Oct 9 Italian troops erected a statue of Mussolini in Adowa, symbolically erasing the humiliation suffered at the hands of Menelik in 1896 (NYTI; Youtube). It probably was the head of Mussolini, carved from a rock, surveying the rocks and the desert. There was no jungle surrounding the statue. Future research will have to show whether this Mussolini monument, erected by his troops, is identical with the one depicted in Bosworth’s biography (2002, 63, Plate 14, 247). I assume it is. 

The Mussolini head resembles somewhat the famous Sphinx in Egypt, but it could well have inspired he idea of Ananke and the whole poem, if Stevens had seen it in U.S. newspapers at that time. The description in the poem, section six, fits the statue very well, its protuberant eyes, its ears, and its dictatorial jaw. The African statue in the poem would simply be Mussolini’s head carved out of a rock:

The marble was imagined in the cold.

Its edges were taken from tumultuous wind

That beat out slimmest edges in the ear,

Made of the eye an insatiable intellect.

Its surfaces came from distant fire; and it

Was meant to stand, not in a tumbling green,

Intensified and grandiose, but among

The common-places of which it formed part … 

(OP, 56-57; compare Bosworth, Plate 14)

If this is the statue placed near the cathedral of Adowa, it may also symbolize the necessay angel: the poet subdues reality to his symbols, like Mussolini did with Ethiopia. After all, Stevens may have referred to the Mussolini statue when he wrote to Latimer: “The specific subject is, I suppose, the white man in Africa. But it may be that no one will ever realize that.” (L, 308)