Politics & Power Quote by Wallace Stevens

Stevens is needling a nation that keeps trying to inherit its culture like an heirloom. The line has the snap of a poet who hears America auditioning for Englishness and finding the costume doesn’t fit. “Nothing could be more inappropriate” isn’t polite disagreement; it’s a flat dismissal of the assumption that literary legitimacy flows downstream from London. He’s not denying influence so much as refusing deference.

The operative move is “sensibility.” Stevens isn’t arguing that Americans lack British vocabulary, forms, or even reading habits; he’s arguing that the inner weather is different. Sensibility names a whole ecosystem: what feels natural to celebrate, what registers as serious, how irony lands, how the landscape presses on imagination. In that sense, the “English source” becomes a kind of imported climate. You can plant the same seeds, but the crop changes.

Context matters: Stevens is writing out of a modernist moment when American writers were aggressively renegotiating the terms of tradition. Pound and Eliot looked to Europe to remake poetry; Stevens, more stubbornly local, keeps insisting that imagination must answer to the real as it is lived here - commercial, sprawling, unmoored from old class rituals, haunted by new kinds of emptiness. His jab at “source” also hints at the anxiety of origins: a young literature trying to prove it isn’t derivative by declaring derivation beside the point.

The subtext is cultural independence, but without flag-waving. It’s aesthetic sovereignty: the demand that American literature stop treating England as a parent and start treating it as one influence among many, often mismatched to the American nervous system.