In his 1936 essay ‘The Irrational Element in Poetry’ Wallace Stevens writes, ‘we are preoccupied with events, even when we do not observe them closely’ The poet's relation to external events, proximate and remote, preoccupied Stevens in the years leading up to and beyond America's entry into the Second World War. For American civilians, especially before Pearl Harbor, the location of the war seemed irreducibly distant. This chapter is about how that distance intervenes and is negotiated in American poetry in the period when the United States is moving toward intervention in Europe. Although the argument takes some of its bearings from Stevens' thinking, the primary focus of attention is the work of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. It has become customary for readings of Moore and Bishop to array the two poets sequentially, to distinguish Bishop as the postmodern heir to Moore's modernism; my project is rather different in that it investigates their simultaneous adjustments to impending hostilities. The crucial difference between them for this purpose has to do with spatial rather than temporal coordinates. According to my argument, the ‘violence without’ that calls for poetic modification varies in pressure according to each poet's location within the United States, so that local as well as national conditions give shape and materials to the poetry that emerges.

This chapter, then, is in part concerned with the effect of geographical location on the development of American poetry in wartime.