Wallace Stevens’ Hidalgo in a “most unpropitious place”

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article traces the course of the “hidalgo” figure across Stevens’ poetic career. The importance of this figure lies in how it plays an archetypal role in relationships to places in several poems by Stevens. What begins skeletally as a literary trope in Harmonium becomes more theoretical in Stevens’books from the 1940s and 50s. As Stevens’Spanish superego and alter-ego, the hidalgo merits critical deployment to uncover the role of the importance of places in many of his poems. In several poems from Harmonium, the hidalgo, like many of Stevens’ other personas that will evolve in later works, exists in inchoate forms such as Spanish dons and behind the masks of characters like Crispin from the poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” In poems from the socially turbulent 1930s, the hidalgo and other Spanish personas serve to express unease with the impositions of public life on the private individual’s struggles for relationships with places. In later books from the 1940s and 50s, the hidalgo figure becomes fully recognizable as Stevens’ archetype of both the notion of place itself and of Stevens poetic voice itself. Finally, in1954, one year before Stevens’ death, it appears that the masculine hidalgo is part of a poetic construction that is always transforming seasonal change into feminine desire. This study offers readers of Stevens an archetypal localization of his familiar theme of the relationship between the imagination and reality.