Mechanical Optimist, the

“The Mechanical Optimist” is the first of four anti-religious poems collected under the title, “A Thought Revolved.” It appeared in the 1937 book of poems, The Man with the Blue Guitar. The “mechanical optimist” appears to refer to the radio, seemingly exhorting a woman dying of diabetes to “rejoice, rejoice!” as it cheerfully explains current events.
Strangely enough, Stevens himself had a high genetic risk for diabetes. Ironically, this risk and a high blood pressure prevented Stevens from ever successfully passing the physical exam required for life insurance.
==A Cheerful Exegesis of the Poem==
Eleanor Cook treats “A Thought Revolved” quite harshly. She says that these four interrelated poems react “against religious and moral notions, especially simplistic ones. The effect is somewhat crude after the subtleties and passion of ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’” (130).
Certainly, while an optimist may be considered positive, Stevens certainly considered a mechanical optimist negatively. The woman at the center of “The Mechanical Optimist” listens to the radio, passively catching the “lesser dithyrambs” of the news and whatnot. The second stanza indicates her indifference to religion, and the third stanza, while approving of the idea of the Alps (i.e., imagination), recognizes that this may not be enough at the close of one’s life. Her only consolation—if we may use that word—appears to be the radio to which she listens. It explains the meaning of “familiar things in a cheerful voice.” Thus, Stevens seems to call the radio itself a “mechanical optimist”—an entity completely incapable of offering any true consolation, hope, or poetry.
==The Radio in Other Venues==
On a related note, Stevens can be quite biting in his references to the radio. For example, in the essay "Three Academic Pieces," Stevens makes references to "one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folk-lore of the world of the radio -- remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales" (Collected Poetry and Prose 688). Radios, it might be said for Stevens, are an enemy of the imagination.
Cook, Eleanor. A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens.Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007. Web. 26 Feb 2014