Greenest Continent, the

Stevens describes in his Letters that "the greenest continent" that he writes about in "Owl's Clover, the Greenest Continent," refers to Africa (305). The poem compares Africa, art (especially poetry, not surprisingly), "and the ordeal of rediscovery that awaits the poet in the wilderness in which he has newly set foot" (Doyle 164).
In his early composition of this poem, it seems Stevens had particular difficulty nailing down exactly what he wanted it to say: "In a way it deals with the 'orderly relations of society as a whole'. It cannot, however, deal with those relations flatly and explicitly; one would have to be a Lucretius of politics, say, to do that sort of thing. Possibly the point at which intelligence is inimical is a movable point" (Letters 305). Later, though, he describes that he is "head over heels" for the poem" (307). He eventually delves into the meaning of "The Greenest Continent" in the 1940 letter to Hi Simons, dividing it into four separate dimensions: "it concerns the difficulty of imposing the imagionation on those that do not share it," the dichotomies of knowledge of good and evil/Europe and Africa/God and poetry/etc, the conversion of the facts into abstractions, and the necessity of belief in something created by the imagination (Letters 369-370).
==Sources and Further Reading==
Wallace Stevens, by Charles Doyle
"Wallace Stevens and Mussolini," by Wolfgang Karrer
Letters of Wallace Stevens