Can it really be that someone else is suggesting the importance of Wallace Stevens to today’s right-of-center dialogue? It’s Roger Kimball, of course!

Stevens argued that our artistic commitments must always be to the present, and not to some imagined future. The latter kind of artist he perceived as a sort of an obstacle to what he called “reality,” splitting off into a variety of cheapened rhetorics and modes. He’d undoubtedly have found the poetry and art our times to be oppressively “secondary.”

But also please read his essay “Insurance and Social Change” where Stevens described the gamut of the world’s insurance industries, from totalitarian systems to a variety of socialistic models, and concluded by expressing the utmost faith in the adaptability of the American insurance industry.

In the end, he wrote, “it is all a question of remaining solvent, a question of making a reasonable profit … Even if the point is considered from the view of nationalization of the business, it is not to be supposed that any government can maintain an entire population indefinitely at a loss.”