Many critics, writing on Stevens` poetry of the 1930s, assume that there is a hiatus between his poetry and the contemporary social surroundings. They think his "turning left" during the thirties has ended up in failure because it was against his grain that was for "pure poetry". Largely grown out of the thirties` polemics between realism and the new criticism, however, the assumed hiatus misses the fact that the concern with the immediate surroundings was at the heart of his poetry from the very beginning of his poetic career. Evidence found in his letters, notes, as well as in his poems and proses of this period indicates that he, like anybody else around him, was preoccupied with the events and issues of his day. His job as a surety and fidelity lawyer in an insurance company provided him a basis for "a relentless contact" with the disturbing social realities of the Depression, because the cases he mostly dealt with involved the problems of the capitalistic system at that time: money and credit. Stevens` turning toward society during the thirties was a spontaneous reaction owing to his daily experiences. It was a part of his practical search for a new and credible ideals about "How to live. What to do" in a turbulent, materialistic society, not merely a literary engagement. Acute observations on the need for reestablishing the importance of poetry as a "sanction" of life(L, 299) are found through all the three representative works of this period. The commonplace book, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects is vomposed of fragmental excerpts from his readings of French and British art criticism. They constitute an inductive kind of defence of poetry, for all the quoted items centered around the question of true art`s nature and the function in society. Owl`s Clover, the longest poem of the period, comes close to the social problems of the contemporary world. Stevens looks at the intersecting arguments of Marxists, Fascists, and Socialists of his day and finds a substantial common ground: the everyday world governed by the necessity (Ananke) of suffering and consolations. Stevens puts foremost importance on the imagination, for it can provide a credible ideal that can be shared in a given community to make life`s hardships endurable. In The Man with the Blue Guitar, he sketches out an ideal rooted in the native soil: for example, in the figure of an electrician on the industrial suburb (Oxidia, which resembles the east Hartford), who can wee an Olympia in the soot of fire.