At London Review of Books's Blog David Bromwich Mulls Wallace Stevens & 'The Donald'

London Review of Books's blog features a new post by David Bromwich on Wallace Stevens's poem "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz." With its lines about mobs and political groups in the 1930s, it is startlingly prescient with today's Donald Trump supporters. More:

I’ve been thinking about some lines of a poem by Wallace Stevens called ‘Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz’:

There are these sudden mobs of men,
These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,
Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.
Too many waltzes have ended.

The lines are the work of an American poet writing in the 1930s, and the first thing that may come to mind is the hunger marchers of the Depression. But there were other mobs then, in Germany, Italy and elsewhere. It could seem that the masses of men were taking into their own hands the next stage of the world’s advance, or the world’s motion; the direction might not be forward. They were crying out for something they were cheated of – obscurely this would be their thought, if you could turn it into language. The action was like the kicking of a leg from the pricking of a nerve; not to be enlisted in the cause of enlightenment, or anything like that.

Find out more at LRB.