I explore here, in “Masculine Fecundity and ‘Overinclusiveness,'” the work of my Wallace Stevens, and think about his gender identity, his masculinity, in relation to the imagery of pregnancy that runs throughout his work. I argue that he felt and then grew away from a complex association of birth to death.

One colleague laughed at me to my face about the choice of subject here, masculine fecundity, and it is likely that others found it in poor taste too. That’s part of the point. In this early essay, written a few years out of graduate school, I was giving the finger to the clichés and taboos of my institutional training as a critic, writing about aspects of poetry and my own emotional life that were, or seemed, set out of bounds.

Methodologically, the essay calls on psychoanalytic theory: Donald Winnicott’s idea of fantasy as a transitional space that makes emotional growth possible, and Jessica Benjamin’s observations about men’s emotional lives in relation to pregnancy and mothering. And looking at it with the distance of almost two decades, perhaps the happiest thing about it is the loving knowledge of the work of Stevens at play in the readings.