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LORD, Georgianna Wuletich, 1931— THE ANNIHILATION OF ART IN THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1962 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan significant value. All of its efforts, therefore, are to make the un­

real— that in which the imagination desires to believe— real and

therefore worthy of belief.

Stevens’ poetry and thought, then,springs from a dialectic between

the imagination and reality, both of which are, in their most basic sense,

internalized in the mind as wish (aspiration) and reason. Wish Implies

the urge toward pleasure; reason, toward common sense and logic. Wish is

the impulse toward grace; reason, toward gravity. Stevens believed that

the dialectic between reality and the imagination is endless, that there

is a war in the mind that will never end because the mind's desire to

satisfy itself will never be fulfilled. Indeed, the major premise of

Stevens' thought is that the wish of the imagination will never be ful­

filled. Underlying that major premise is a clash of irreconcilable

desires: the desire to achieve fulfillment; the desire to be discon­

tent. Put another way, it is the desire to believe and the inability

to (desire not to) believe.

The imagination and reality enjoy a temporary armistice whenever

each new wish postulated by the imagination is momentarily refined and sanctioned by reason, instead of being denied categorically. Ihat tem­ porary armistice is, as Stevens writes in "The Necessary Angel," a bal­ ance of imagination and reality (imagination and reason). However, the truce is soon broken when reality sceptically questions the imagination's achievement, desiring to break down the "romantic tenements of rose and ice." Once those facile illusions are corroded, the imagination with inexhaustible reserves of vitality again proposes a new wish in which it for the Inhibited instruments/ Of overcivil stops." Above all, he is afraid of too much beauty* preciosity* refinement, elegance; for that will only stop him in his search "for the fecund minimum." He finds this in a realism turned sordid* of decay and stench. But ever the ele­ gant* inane connoisseur* posturing as if to Judge among fine wines one that he will have with a feast*

Tilting his nose* He inhaled the rancid rosin* burly smells Of dampened lumber* emanations blown Fran warehouse doors* the gustlness of ropes* Decays of sacks* and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out (p. 3 6 ) •

Crispin tries to arrive at an aesthetic, not for poetry* but for prose* whose single virtue* as Stevens was to note later in "a Collect of Philosophy," resides in its power to express a concept that is inher­ ently poetic. Anticipating this idea at the end of part III* he writes:

He gripped more closely the essential prose As being... Die one Integrity for him* the one Discovery still possible.to make*... unless That prose should wear a poem's guise at last.

However, Crispin is not Interested in the poetic concept at the core of prose. For him it must be prose on the surface and prose at the core:

Exit the mental moonlight* exit lex Hex and prlnclplum* exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse.

Art, for him the purest prose, will be addressed to the "rankest trivia" thus to be the "tests of the strength/ Of his aesthetic, his philosophy.'

There is nothing benevolent in his vision: "The more invidious, the more desired." Finally, with sustained pomposity he writes "his prolegomena," 97 vhich, curiously enough, has little of the austerity of essential prose, hut rather recalls his trivial, though Innocent Interests before he even set out on a voyage.

The natives of the rain are rainy men. Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes And April hllmides wooded white and pink Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears. And their music showering sounds intone (p. 37)*

Again, and again, all of his attempts to baalsh romance, beauty, and to achieve the essential prose, Which Is perfection for Crispin, are doomed to fall. For the Imagination-- no matter how permanently maimed it may be (as It certainly Is with Crispin), still flickers. As Stevens writes:

These bland excursions Into'time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering.

Denying the Imagination, which for him Is Invariably associated"with counterfeit,/ With masquerade of thought, with hapless words..he Is nevertheless one to perpetuate counterfeit himself with his own delusions of grandeur. But he thinks all the while that he is being a heroic real­ ist s he Is always "serenely sly” of all artifice. He claims that he pre> fers "text to gloss," and therefore "humbly served/ Grotesque apprentice­ ship to chance event," humbly submitted to the vicissitudes of fortune; but perhaps, as Stevens writes, not so humbly after all: "A clown perhaps, but an aspiring clown" (p. 31).

The aspiration for fame, nobility, perfection can no more be denied in Crispin than can the romantic dreams which for him are "not/ The on­ coming fantasies of better birth," but rather "a monotonous babbling." Even in dreaming, "he did it in a gingerly vay," desiring that "all dreams ...he expunged." Are ve to conclude, therefore, that vith his retreat to hermitage, to ”A Nice Shady Home" he has finally forsworn romance, and achieved true asceticism, 'becoming finally "pure and capa­ ble"? It seems that he is no longer "discontent," no longer the "prick­ ling realist." (Ironically, for Crispin, discontent is associated vith the quest for reality and not, as it is for Stevans, vith the romantic agony,) "He might have come/ To colonize his polar planterdom/ And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee.” In these lines Stevens forecasts the end of Crispin's career: a colony which amounts to taking a wife and having children. This idea evidently occurs to Crispin in "A Nice Shady Home" soon after he has retired into his hermitage. But, as Stevens writes,

"his emprize to that idea soon sped," and therefore Crispin temporarily resists the final reduction by reality.

What then is this monastic existence like? And what artistic achieve­ ment does it finally culminate in? Again his mind proceeds not to the romantic, but rather to "things within his actual eye," to the real, now seen not harshly, cruelly in its stark elemental forms, but leavened by desire for comfort and pleasure. Even so, he strives for asceticism,

"alert/ To the difficulty of rebellious thought/ When the sky is blue."

But the "blue infected will,” the imagination Infects, corrupts his asce­ tic spirit, Stevens writes ironically. Crispin sees that "Infection" not as liberation— as Indeed it would have been had his commitment not been befuddled in the first place; rather for him it is confinement:

But day by day, now this thing and now that Confined him, while it cosseted, condoned, 99

Little by little, as If the suzerain soil Abashed him by carouse to humble yet Attach (p. hO).

He might have been glad to think that this confinement was part of the

"chance event" to which he decided melodramatically to surrender himself.

Indeed, he says that It seemed haphazard denouement." But Isn't this

sweet, maternal confinement always the refuge he sought when he was driven

from the storm In Yucatan to the bosom of the church, when In rounding

his rude aesthetic out, he progressed from the harsh elemental ding an

sich to the "gold's maternal warmth" (p. 32), when he left the Artlc for

"a flourishing tropic," when, finally having shown the exit to "Bex...,

princlplum" and the whole/ Shebang," he himself began to Inscribe "Com­

mingled souvenirs and prophecies"? What he attempts to deny has all come

back upon him with tender vengeance, for "These bland excursions” of his

"Contained in their afflatus the reproach," the very thing that from the

beginning Crispin has been struggling to deny. His only course of action,

whether he will or no, Is to return to what he had denied:

He first, as realist, admitted that Whoever hunts a matlnal continent May, after all, stop short before a plum And be content and still be realist.

Realist though he claims he has become, precisely what kind of a

realist Is he now? In answering that question, Crispin Indeed defines

the kind of art he finally produces. Realizing that the real form of

the plum outlives all of those forms that the artist appropriates to It, he decides that his moral Integrity leads him to demand the real thing.

For him the real thing is "good, fat, guzzly fruit,” and seen In this way, the only thing he can do Is to eat It. "So Crispin hasped on the 100

surviving form." The search for artistic Integrity comes to an end— or

almost to an end— as he gulps down the plum. In what is a hilarious,

grandiloquent prologue to the finale, Stevens questions precisely how

Crispin will choose to describe his final decision to eat the plum. Will

he, as wewould expect from someone who has a sense of perspective, sim­

ply say nothing at all? Or, instead

Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedlam's testament? Prolong His active force In an inactive dirge, Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs unfolded to the outmost clouds? Because he built a cabin who once planned loquacious columns by the ructlve sea? Because he turned to salad-beds again?

Crispin, of course, never gives up the chance to see himself In some

heroic and noble pose. For his definition of reality Is nob what is, but

"what Is is what should be." He Is the one to decide what reality will

be. Put concisely, he Is to define the supreme fiction for himself. i Ihking a wife, he enjoys the "flourishing tropic...," Ever In his own

eyes a noble rider, Crispin sees himself as "magister of a single room,"

enjoying a "congenial sleep" to the fugal requiems of the "crickets"

beating "their tambours in the wind,” noble "custodians" Marching a motionless march."

It would seem that his marriage, which necessitates a capitulation

to the mundane, destroys the possibility of any kind of Imaginative

creativity. But Crispin would be the last one to admit that: 101

But the quotidian composed as his...

Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights... the quotidian Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner. For all it takes It gives a humped return Exchequerlng from piebald fiscs unkeyed.

Vith singular wit, Stevens abstracts sexual detail from an account— a fiscal account -- of Crispin's gains in the pleasures of sexual union.

What, finally, Is the net result? Stevens commands Ironically:

"Forgather and bell boldly Crispin's last/ Deduction." It is indeed a deduction in a number of senses. It is, first of all, the final reduc­ tion, destruction, of Crispin's imagination— whatever is left after his first real encounter with the sea. And in the very heroic and pompous tones in vhlch his final demise is related, deducting is a mawkish ra­ tionalization of his failure. And, therefore, in the spirit of the mock epic poem-- where an Ignoble event is narrated in elevated diction— Ste­ vens describes Crispin's works of art, his daughters in phrases vhich alternate the crude with the sublime. The buffets of fortune, of chance event— the strenuous "Anabasis or slump, ascent or chute"— culminate in

"chits," his daughters playing around his lofty "cloudy, prophetic" knee.

His offspring is"diviner young," even though his lordly pursuits "Involved him in midwifery so dense." His cabin is first a lofty "phylactery," then a "haunt," then "dome,” and finally a "halldom.” With his own romanti­ cized vision of his daughters, Crispin "Effective colonizer" is "sharply stopped/ In the door-yard by his own capacious blooms." Hie realist, in the last analysis, is stopped in his quest for perfection, for a starker barer self, not by the "fecund minimum" but by the "civil stops" of "his own capacious blooms." 102

What goes oa In Crispin's mind at this point Is hard to say* Perhaps like everything else too real to be spoken about, it is glossed over by a highly rouantlcized and idealized image of his daughters, "most sisterly," regal, chaste, pure. He makes out of the "differing struts" "four blithe instruments," there to be harmonized according to another lex and prince plum. This then is Crispin's achievement:

Crispin concocted doctrine from the rout. The vorld, a turnip once so readily plucked, Sacked up and carried overseas, daubed out Of its ancient purple, pruned to the fertile main, And sown again by the stiffest realist Came reproduced in purple, family font, The same Insoluble lump. The fatalist Stepped in and dropped the chuckling down his craw, Without grace of grumble (p. *4-5) •

Crispin had smeared, besmirched the "ancient purple," until it was reduced to something bare and ugly. He has "sown again" this world, the mother earth he takes for a wife; and he has reaped his harvest: "The same

Insoluble lump," the artistic abortion. This was the vision of his life: he has to like it or lump it, to chuck it "down his craw."

How, then, are we to see Crispin? And what value has his tale for us? We may, as Stevens writes, "Score this anecdote" "as Crispin willed"

It, in which case we shall see it as

Disguised pronounclamento, summary Autumn's compedlum, strident In itself But muted, mused, and perfectly revolved In those portentous accents, syllables, And sounds of music coming to accord Upon his lap, like their inherent sphere, Serdphlcoproclamatlons of the pure Delivered with a deluging onwardness.

But, if we are somewhat puzzled by Crispin's thunderous and melodramatic air— especially if, after all of his talk, we still don't know what he 103 is saying— ) if) that la, "the music sticks," and sounds unauthentlc,

"if the anecdote/ Is false,

if Crispin is a profitless Philosopher, beginning vith green brag, Concluding fadedly, if as a man Prone to distemper.• • and so on, Stevens continues, unraveling the real meaning of Crispin*s tale, disguised by "green brag," tvisted out of shape by Crispin's "dis­ temper" and "abatement in taste," finally by his predilection for "Gloz- lng his life vith after-shining flicks," "Illuminating.. .plain and common things." In the end, as Stevens vrites, Crispin proves that "what he proves/ Is nothing." Hie narration of valet-Crlspln comes to an end. The

Inagination of Crispin is clipped, made "incomp Ideate”with that vhlch made

t him Crispin. And, as Stevens adds, ironically, vith a vink: "So may the relation of each man be clipped."

Of all the poems in Harmonium "The Comedian as the Letter C" fore­ casts most significantly the central themes of Stevens' art as they re­ ceive expression in the poems from "The Man vith the Blue Guitar" to the very end of his career. As part of the process of self-perfection— the search for artistic Integrity vhlch comes to dominate Stevens' concern from "Ideas of Order" onvard— Crispin is constantly avaitlng a discovery of his ''barer self." That barer self is a comic variation of double as abstracted self, a theme Stevens examines vith high seriousness in "An

Ordinary Evening in Nev Haven", it is also a paltry version of the mon­ ster vhich the poet confronts in "The Man vith the Blue Guitar." The poet in "Hie Man..." knovs that he must somehow come to terms with the monster.

But he is agonized by realizing that their reconciliation requires that he himself be partly reduced to the monster. Crispin-down gladly suffers his reduction, never really realizing that he has lost everything beau­ tiful when he denies his angelic imagination— whatever there is of it, that Is, In the first place. Indeed, the first condition of his being a comic butt is that he not be able to assess the magnitude of his los­ ses. Had Crispin any idea at the end of his career how his quest for the most sordid reality mangled him, he would have cried out with des­ peration like the genuine poet pleading "To One of Fictive Music" (p. 8 8 )

"Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:/ lbe imagination that we spumed and crave."

He would be the last, then, to admit that he is a failure, or that the goal he seeks is from the very beginning false. His enterprises anticipate "the false engagements of the mind," in "Esthetique du Mai."

Like some of the evil genulses of that poem, he too is striving to per­ fect himself; like others in the same poem, he is striving to deny, to cast away, what he is: to destroy the imagination. But the Imagination returns— the veritable thing, like pain in "Esthetique du Mai"— and is implied in all of his attempts to gloss over reality. The romance that had been rejected by Crispin returns with sweet revenge in his grandiloquent posturing and pompous phrases, the embarrassing proof, when all the facts of his life disguised by him are finally known, that this fine realist is, in the end, only a romantic. His efforts to perfect himself, like the efforts of all the characters in "Esthetique du Mai" have gone "askew." But there is a major difference in the results that

Crispin achieves and those that the characters in "Esthetique du Mai” achieve. For while the characters who seek perfection in "Esthetique du Mai" soar Imaginatively above the level of reality, Crispin strives to plunge deeply into the thickest slime.

Nobility, therefore, is not extinct for him; it can never be for anyone, since it is the very principle of life. Rather it is nobility turned grotesque, absurd, mad, and finally fading ignominlously into the final reductions of "the stiffest realist." This then is Crispin's ver­ sion of the "fecund minimum." In "The Comedian.••" abstraction Is con­ ceived pejoratively, in its reductive sense. But— as in virtually every central theme in his art— Stevens came to observe the potential good and the potential evil Inherent in it. The "fecund minimum" of Crispin is strongly condemned in one of Stevens' later poems, "Landscape with

Boat.” Yet, in "The Snow Man" the "barer starker self" issues in a pow­ erful poem and a vision bleak and magnificent. Finally, in the poems in

Farts of a World and those that follow, the "fecund minimum" is conceived of as the divine essence, the ultimate abstraction: of the hero, of the imagination, and finally of the ultimate poem.

To explore the varying meanings that perfection, tranquility, and finally the "fecund minimum” come to have for Stevens, I now discuss those poems in Harmonium where Stevens attempts to show the imagination, now no longer plunging below the level of reality, rising by degrees up­ ward, toward things increasingly pure, enobllng.

"Ohi C 'etait mon extase et mon amour" I

The "Comedian..." raises yet another problem that fascinates and comes to obsess Stevens: the rdstlonshlp between the artist and reality. desires to "believe. Again there issues a temporary armistice— where

reason refines the structure postulated by the imagination to achieve

a new balance of reality and imagination. But like the previous equi­

librium, this one too is destined to last very briefly. For the pattern

of breakdown and reconstitution is inherent in the tragic rhythms of

life. Yet the fatality implied in such endless repetition is alleviated by the fact that the interminable cycles of decreation and reconstruction change by degrees as each new breakdown and synthesis imply an evolution and purification of thought and vision. Instead of being permanently crippled or debased by the assaults of reason, the imagination, with each new defeat, reasserts Itself more boldly, unrealistically, extra--

vagantly. It is reason that accommodates itself to the imagination, rather than the other way around. For each temporary balancing of rea­ son and imagination ascends by degrees from the level of a previous synthesis, so that Stevens1 definition of reality grows in this dialectic progressively abstract, spiritual, impossible, unreal, pure. Those changing definitions of reality come for Stevens to be stepping stones which he must use in order to arrive at the one goal that comes for him to mean more than anything else: the idea of God. Critics who have facilely used the term""reality" fail altogether to see that its defi­ nitions change from one level to another in the continuous dialectic present in his poetry. They assume that this term means "sensuous real­ ity," failing to observe how reality comes to have any number of meanings for Stevens.

I do not propose in this Introduction to define those terms. I wish 106

Crispin believes that the real thing, the veritable plum, transcends everything artificial. That conclusion of his at the end of a series of futile attempts to arrive at a vision Is a noble rationalization of his desire not to paint tho plum, but to seize it and devour it. For Stevens,

Crispin's conclusion comes to have a compelling validity indeed. For from the poems in Parts of a World to the very end of his career, Stevens is tormented by the fact that all of his desires and efforts to bring to art the purest spiritual ideals end only in failures: far from presenting reality faithfully, the artist only mutilates it. And this is precisely the tragic and ironic lesson that Stevens, the artist intent on self-per­ fection, masters fully.

It was a lesson that the early essay "The Noble Rider.points to.

In that essay Stevens writes that the artist must abstract the noble pa> ticular from reality. Yet exactly how was such abstraction to be accom­ plished t In "The Noble Rider” he does not ^provide the answer. Andyst he seems to feel that somehow abstraction is involved in the very problem of definition. As we recall, Stevens was terrified of things too concisely defined; for he maintained that once meanings are "fixed," they are robbed of life. One of the major conditions of life for him is motion, and change inherent in motion. He was deeply fearful that art itself would, through the process of abstraction, formulate the noble particular so that it (the particular) would cease to exist. At the same time, he re­ alized that some measure of tranquility had to be achieved, so that the mind could attain that degree of comprehension which it needs, for exam­ ple, in "Domination of Black." 107

In the buoyant, life-giving poem, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" (p.

9 8 ), ve see a vision of the sea that is not uniformly noble. Nor, Indeed, can it be, unless the rhythm and movement of life are arrested in art.

The first two lines of each section of the poem conjure the scene as it seems to be, static: "In that November of Tehuantepec,/ The slopping of the seagrev still one night." Hie sunlight streaming on the deck and on the ocean in the morning initiates casual meditations and fanciful assoc­ iations: "And in the morning summer hued the deck/ And made one think of rosy chocolate/And gilt umbrellas." At this point in each section, Ste­ vens asks a question vhlch, in its enthusiasm, buoyancy, and rapture both elevates and celebrates the imagination which, from casual associa­ tions, evokes sudden bounteous, remarkable transformations in the scene.

Who then, in that ambroislal latitude Out of the light evolved the moving blooms, Who then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?

Each section, then, in the poem has a quiet beginning, followed by a slight stir of motion once the sunlight falls upon the deck and the mind starts to make a few random observations; then there is a resurgence of the imagination, seeming to spring out of nowhere like a geyser. Without that sudden activity, there would be no meaning; for, as "Sea Surface..." bears out, meaning is inseparable from the emotion which effects the major transformations on the scene whose meaning is sought for. Each section, therefore, has a*beginning, a middle, and an end of the sort I have just sketched.

But each of the six transfigurations, each of the six sections them selves, mark stages in the evolution of feeling. For, as the sea is beheld, 108 the nearly amorphous evolution of feeling proceeds from tenderness and ease In part III, to languor, and desire In part IV, to ribald mirth In the conclusion. The emotions suggest that the Imagination has felt in­ spired, disquieted, overpowered, dazzled, dizzied, and then In the end, slightly degraded. When the Imagination Is most overwhelmed at in part

III, the senses are, as It were, ecstatically deranged. Then they har­ monize synesthetlcally: sounds are seen and colors heard.

Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms Unfolding In the water, feeling sure Of milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then, The sea unfolding In the sunken clouds? Oh.1 C * eta It mon extase et mon amour.

But ecstasy, which cannot be long sustained, slowly subsides into lan­ guorous desire, giving rise in part IV to a less noble kind of feeling.

In turn this fades:

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing Would — But more suddenly the; heaven rolled Its bluest sea-clouds In the thlcklng green, And the nakedness became the broadest blooms.

The cycle of feeling from exhilaration and a sense of power, culminating

In rapture, is dissipated at the end, and rises again only In the image of imagination turned clown, delighting in its own buffoonery.

Cycles of perfection and Imperfection are the very rhythms of life.

If life— if everything real— is to be celebrated, then everything must be Included alike: "mon esprit batard," as veil as "mon enfant, mon bijou, mon £me.” But for Stevens, whose quest for purity came to be the over­ riding principle of his life, the responsibility of an all-inclusive vi­ sion was rather difficult to accept. If a sustained vision of the beautl- 109 ful and the good was not possible, he would have to celebrate a vision of life vhlch at least culminated in an image of purity. Those injunc­ tions, of course, Implied that the cycle of life— the unending rise and fall of emotions— had at one point to be stopped. And, as he came to realize keenly, to stop motion vould necessarily destroy the life-giving power of the imagination.

Stevens seemed to realize early in his career that unless motion was somehow contained in forms (definitions of a sort), it vould be squandered as mere vlsh, vhlch, in the absense of fulfillment, vould be degraded by its own frustration. Yet if motion were contained too rigid­ ly (if the vision vere too noble, austere and unchanging), life vould be destroyed. One gets the feeling that the "heroine" of "Infanta Marina,r is the first of Stevens' unreal people, who, because they are too noble, are unable— as he himself probably knew they vould be— to sustain be­ lief. Marina is simply too regal, too imperious to mingle freely with the vide audience that art must address in order to remain the spiritual center of our lives. While the tendency toward unreality, toward exces­ sive nobility is checked for the most part in Harmonium, it runs wild in many of the poems in Parts of a World.

But, most ironically, even Stevens' final poems reveal that he never surmounted the dread that the thought of art deteriorating into artifice, losing its contact vith the reel world, inspired in him. In Harmonium, vith deliberate understatement in the brief poem "Hie Ordinary Women"

(p. 10), Stevens observes such deterioration. These fine ladles "from their poverty...rose../ They flitted through the palace vails. They flung 110 monotony 'behind." The nohillty of their flight from the hanal is marred by a failure of spirit: they were "nonchalant.11 The precious diction in

this poem implies their fall from nobility; they are both exotic and ar­

tificial. The artifice explicitly stated suggests a deterioration of passion and sly seductiveness: "How explicit the coiffures became,/ The diamond point, the sapphire point,/ The sequins/ Of civil fansJ" The last

stanza repeats the first, excepting a curious dislocation of adjectives

in the second line. The implication is that their release from boredom was momentary and that a change of place has produced no essential trans­ formations within them: "Then from their poverty they rose/ From dry guitars, and to catarrhs."

No matter how much Stevens may be peeved at these artificial ladles, he is surely not ready at this moment to throw art overboard. For he knows that art means too much to loo many people. In the brief and tender poem

"Explanation" (p. 72), art is the manifestation of the ideal without which neither mother nor daughter can live. The daughter, embroidering

French flowers on an old, black dress, realizes that she cannot create something beautiful and says sadly: "Here is nothing of the ideal,/ Neln,/

Neln." The mother's reply is tender, but expresses futility. While she herself cannot sew her daughter a beautiful dress, she Imagines the ideal; if only she could achieve the ideal.

It would have been different, Liebchen, If I had imagined myself, In an orange gown, Drifting through space, Like a figure on the church-wall. Ill

Without art, furthermore, vhat vould happen to romance? How could we Imagine Peter Quince without the clavier? Or, put dramatically, how could the plot against giant he devised? For the poem "The Plot Against the Giant" (p. 6 ), is a whimsical allegory on the triumph of civilization over the stone age. Three lovely damsels aided only by the scents of flowers, beauteous colors and "heavenly labials in a world of gutterals" manage by themselves to "abash" and "undo" the giant. Finally, vlthout art there can be no love, Stevens Implies In "Two Figures In Dense Vio­ let" (p. 85). The woman in that poem is obviously irritated because, being in the mood for love, she has no one beside her except some stupid buffo. She instructs him on what he must do; she asks that when he speak he become a poet: "Use dusky words and dusky Images./ Darken your speech."

She does not ask for an unreal, an extravagantly noble image of romance belonging, say, to another day or another culture. She wants him only to arouse her moods that are insouciant, lazy, and mildly, remotely sensual.

But without art, romance deteriorates into lust. Finally, if art Is de­ nied, that denial would be tantamount to obliterating all daydreams, all wishes which sustain us through life. What would the lady In "Last Look at Lilacs" (p. hQ) do, if she could not confect from her crass lover, who scratches his buttocks and utters "scurrilous words," her golden "Don

John," "Prime paramour and belted paragon"?

The transformation from wish to actuality, a theme expressed in "0

Florida Venereal Soil," as well as in "Last Look at the Lilacs," Is in­ deed associated with the power of the Imagination. For Stevens, wish is rarely conceived of In Its degraded form of vish-fulfillment and illusion. 112

Although, as he knows himself, reality must constantly refine the wish to prevent it from deteriorating into "crumbs of whimsy," still his firm belief is that without desire, man is absolutely nothing. It is, then, man's capacity to sustain his dreams— Indeed, to conjure new dreams in the face of disillusion, ugliness, and depression-- that guarantees his survival. The evolution of daydream into reality, therefore, is the very process of poetic creativity: that dialectic between reason and imagina­ tion whereby dream (the unreal) becomes substantial, actualized, real.

These early poems in Harmonium, therefore, express a tendency in his art that is sustained to the very end of his career, as in late poems like

"Poem with Hhythms” and "The World as Meditation."

From the beginning of his career, Stevens is concerned, then, to make desires and dreams real in two senses: first in making them sub­ stantial: and second, as he reveals in "The Paltry Nude Starts on a

Spring Voyage," in curbing the excesses of the imagination so that its vision will not be too noble, and, therefore, unbelievable. For, as he wrote in "The Noble Rider...," our visions cannot be imperial, when we live in a democracy where one must be "immune to eloquence."

Of all the poems in Harmonium, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" is the most sustained celebration of art and the most serene apollonian vision. Die serenity, purity, and ripeness of emotion here reappear with such beauty only in parts of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” As the poem begins, Peter Quince is speaking to a lady beside him; gradually however, he seems to lose sight of her, and the dramatic monologue culmi­ nates in a lyrical elevation of Susanna perfected as memory. Clearly 113 losing Bight of the Indy "beside him, he is already in the second stanza participating in the imagined scene. The structure of "Peter Quince,"

therefore, vhlch implies the gradual abstraction of the mind from the

real to the imagined, marks another major characteristic of some of

Stevens' middle and final poems, "Idea of Order at Key Vest," "Votes

Toward a Supreme Fiction," and finally The Rock.

Bie transport from the real to the Imagined scene in "Peter Quince..." is first Initiated by the sounds on the piano and not by the woman beside him. "Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the selfsame sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too." His desire is attached some­ what casually, as though in passing, to the woman who remains anonymous throughout, her body concealed elegantly in "Blue shadowed silk.” He seems absorbed in the purer pleasures evoked by the sounds of the piano, his own emotions refined and intensified by the recollection of the anci­ ent tale of Susanna. The imagined scene (and emotions generated by sounds) has transcended the real one, so that within no time at all, he has Imagined a little orchestra of bass fiddles, harps, cymbols, horns, and tambourines.

The sounds made on the piano, Instead of being directed immediately to an object (the woman beside him), are purified so that they become an abstraction: 'Xusic is feeling." As abstraction— being without form— feeling (the pleasure in emotions) returns to Peter Quince, then is pro­ jected upon the lady, and finally carries him into the past. He compares his music, his feelings, to the strains (the emotions) "Waked in the elders by Susanna." Music and emotion weave together In the next stanzas: The bastes of their beings throb In witching chords , and their thin blood Pulse plzzicatl of Hozanna.

Trembling vith passion, the elders praise God for Susanna's beauty In

"music" that Is profane. But Quince soon loses sight of both his own passion and that of the elders, and conceives of the common object of

their passion: Susanna herself. Furthermore, he Is Interested most of all not In what Susanna looks like, but rather In vhat she Is doing and

In her emotions. As though playing a harp, "She searched/ The touch of

springs,/ And found/ Concealed imaginings." 3fce Instrument upon which

she plays Is herself. "She sighed/ For so much melody." And "Upon the bank, she stood/ In the cool/ Of spent emotions."

Concealed as the elders, the readers as well as Peter Quince observe

Susanna, our pleasure generated by hers. But the whole manner of obser­ vation here Is anything but a lewdly suggestive Instance of voyeurism.

Bather, the simplicity of diction, the brief lines, the gentle progres­ sion of events, and the utter refinement of the sensual experience that

Susanna herself has, "muslcallze" that starker reality and thereby trans­ form the guilty pleasure Into art. Her own senses trill within her, vi­ brating as the fine tremulo of a huaan voice. But suddenly the magic of the night is Sauted” byftbreath upon her hand." And her music is a- bruptly arrested with the crash of the cymbal and the roar of horns— the blaring and vulgar music of the elders.

The apollonlan serenity, then, where purity and passion are consum­ mately fused in Susanna's sensual experience, Is suddenly cut. For after

Cymbals and horns follows the noise of tambourines, the chattering of the

"simpering Byzantines." Her handmaidens attempt to discover what all the 115 noise was about. "Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame/ Revealed Susanna and her shame." For them It vas enough to see Susanna together vith the elders to be certain that something vile had happened. Susanna vas shamed, of course, but not for the reason the maidens supposed. They vould accuse her of committing adultery with the elders. But truth Is revealed by the pure abstraction of sound, not by Imperfect sight, by

"their lamps' uplifted flame.” Indeed for Stevens it Is music rather than painting and sculpture that, in his poetry, he comes to associate vith the veritable abstraction.

In the final stanza of "Peter Quince,” without any mention of the real woman near the piano, Peter Quince rapturously elevates the purity of Susanna's passion. "Beauty Is momentary In the mind— ": Passion, feeling Is momentary, transitory, unendurlng, vhen it Is evoked only within the mind and not in the body. Sensuality, the deepest feelings that one can experience, require the body: "But in the flesh It is Im­ mortal." What is, after all, the Imagined, "The fitful tracing of a portal” in comparison to the "tough of springs"? Even though "the body dies," therefore, "the body's beauty lives,” since it is the body that made possible the sensual experience, it Is the body that is cele­ brated most of all. The body's beauty endurev like "A wave, interminably flowing." It is the green flesh, sensuous reality, which scents "The cowl of Vinter," so that "done repenting" it can come again to enjoy life, to experience passion and feeling. "Evenings die” and"Maidens die" to "the auroral/ Celebration of a maiden's choral.” Dying, they too fulfill themselves sensually and spiritually (in the archaic use of 6

now to establish only that they have not been clearly defined by his

critics and that they can be understood only by carefully analyzing in

chronological order both the essays and the poems. Definition, however,

•i. is not the end of this study. It is only the means without which the

end would be impossible for me: a rich understanding of Wallace Stevens, the life of his poetry and thought, from its graceful, beautiful, but not very heroic beginnings, through various traumatic stages of his ca­ reer in which his mind achieves a heroism and grandeur. Generally,

Stevens' achievements and temperament have been measured by the poems in "Harmonium," exquisite in themselves, but, as his harshest critics have correctly observed, thrust deeply in the world of refined pleasures, the exquisite pastimes of a leisured group of people. Some of his most beautiful poems belong to "Harmonium." But hiB most heroic and sublime achievements begin with "Ideas of Order." There we see the image of a mind suddenly awakened from its serene contemplation of fragile pieces, to a wild and passionate participation in the turmoil and anxiety of his time. We see him not abstracted as he was in the earlier poems from

"the pressures of reality," but frantically caught in them. "The Man with the Blue Guitar" is a poem written by a man who is almost destroyed by the evil and destruction everywhere about him. It is this aspect of the man Wallace Stevens which my study focuses upon in the final chapters.

Critics, however, have failed to perceive the drama inherent in his com­ mitments, the moral enlargements of his pleasure principle. Indeed, most ironically, they have generally identified Stevens with the effete, pre- ✓ clous man at Naples in the very beginning of "Esthetique du Mai," who listens with cool detachment as Vesuvius rumbles itself to death. In the 116 the vord "die”). Their lust Is enobled by Susanna's auslc. For

Susanna's music touched the bandy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left (for the elders) only Death's ironic scraping, into vhlch their plzzlcati deteriorated, unpurified by her emotions. They are not purified. Nor is she debased, however. For

Now, in its immortality, in plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

It is Peter Quince, then, who is playing that sacrament of praise, directed only passingly to the voman, but ultimately addressed to the abstracted, perfected Suaanna.

The very finest of Stevens' poems invariably evoke a series of pro­ vocative questions, sustaining the complexity of meaning either in a num­ ber of paradoxes or in a riddle. The most curious and unexpected obser­ vation that a close reading of this poem discloses is that while we in­ variably expect that a love poem, beginning as dramatic monologue, will culminate in a proposition, no such thing happens in "Peter Quince.11 For this 1b not a poem of seduction, even while it is one of the most erotic poems in the English language. Yet we are forced to observe a paradox: for what purpose would a nan conjure a vision of pure sensuality, if he had no- intention whatsoever of acting upon itT Yet if ve regard some of Stevens' other poems, ve observe that in "0 Florida, Venereal Soil," the poet Invokes the lady to "conceal" herself, to reveal "fewest things."

In "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," the monocled uncle vould desire more than I anything else to escape from the woman. Stevens clearly conceives of the relationship between poet and his world as an eternal love affair. 117

In "Peter Quince," his most sustained love-lyric, his lyrical meditations not merely abstract him from the real woman by his side; they sustain as an ideal the auto-erotic love of Susanna. And this fact, I think, gives us a clue to what is at one time the intensity and passion of the eraotlcns relected in Stevens' art, as well as the purity and chaste solitude of his commitments. For there is an ambiguity deliberately sustained through^ out this poem which is, indeed, sustained throughout many of Stevens' po­ ems. Are Susanna, the elders, and Peter Quince himself merely playing in­ struments, creating heavenly and melodious sounds? Or are they indeed en- gagin in auto-erotic pastimes? Both are true, at one and the same time.

Again and again Stevens clearly writes that the artist leads a mon­ astic existence. He abstracts himself from the "pressures" of the mul­ titudes of people around him, of, at times, even one person. His passion is to unite with the purest being conceivable— God himself or, in the absense of God, the poet's angelic double. His double appears to him not in the image of another person, but rather through a musical instru­ ment or the instrument of language. It is to that instrument that he re­ lates as though it were everything in the world to him: God, the green world, the body, the soul. His relationship to the world, purified through art, is not austere. It is by turns playful, loving, tender, violent, harsh, cruel, irritable, sublime. This harmony between the soul and art then receives expression in idealizing Narcissism, in love purified of the profane, and yet not so thoroughly purified that it loses its connection with the human. Stevens has no fear, of course, that in the process of purification the soul will be lost. But there is a real 118

danger ■that perfection will lead to a renunciation of the fleshy and that the spirit will stand to suffer most of all from that rejection. There­ fore, as though to celebrate the flesh as an Indispensable part of real­

ity, art, and, most of all, soul and emotion, Stevens emphasizes the im­ portance of the body, not by way of degrading the mind, but by way of

showing that without the body, mind itself is nothing: "Beauty is mo­ mentary in the mind— / But in the flesh it is immortal.”

The blue guitar, then, is Stevens’ constant companion, until there comes a time in his life when he realizes that art too must go. And the moment he accepts that fact, he begins to prepare himself for death.Mor­ tality is a constant source of terror for Stevens from his earliest poems onward. The apollonian vision which Idealizes everything human, the body as well as the soul, therefore, disintegrates under the impact of the di- onysian view of death and suffering. In hiB view of tragedy, Stevens can­ not blithely say "The relation comes benignly, to its end./ So may the relation of each man be clipped" (p. 46). For the separation of body and soul, of the blue guitar and the man who plays it, is a deadly serious matter. What new reconstitution can possibly issue from that destruction?

Is his spirit destined to be united with others in another world? Or is-the search for self-perfection to end ignominiously with the event of death?

The poems I shall discuss next bring Stevens' most morbid, tragic, and agonizing thoughts into bold relief. In them the fear of death is outspoken. But his is a refusal to believe in a heavenly after-life; in his poems on religious belief, he outspokenly maintains, sometimes with brutal cynicism, that belief in a God of orthodox theism is no longer pos­ sible. In the poems written near the end of his life, the imagination 119 craves to 'believe 'beyond belief, to believe even when there is no evi­ dence, no reason for believing. With those sentiments Stevens cooes as close as he ever came in his life to speaking about the necessity of faith. In the poems in Harmonium, however, he is prepared to believe only in truth that can be demonstrated even though he knows that the final experience he can expect to have is death and nothingness.

“For this, then, we endure brief lives"

The first experience with death is often with the passing of our own parents. And since for him the grand parent is mother earth, he must en­ dure death every winter.

If from the earth we came, it was an earth That bore us as part of all the things It breeds and that was lewder than it is. Our nature is her nature. Hence it comes, Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows The same. We parallel the mother's death (p. 107).

The desire to detach himself from the earth and join with "something other," pure and imperishable, is violently and eloquently expressed from "Farts of a World" to the end of his career. Indeed, with the exception of "From the Misery of Don Joost" £> 46), there is no poos in Harmonium, that de* scribes the experience of dying. But in that poem, the body, a child of the earth, is an "old animal." "The powerful seasons bred and killed,/

And were themselves the genii/ Of their own ends." While the resurgence of the summer each year affirms the Interminable cycle of the seasons, still, when Stevens perceives later on that'A A little less returned for him each spring," he comes to desire some means of spiraling toward per­ manence, freeing himself, thereby from the interminable cycle of death and regeneration. But in Harmonium lie tries for the most part to reduce death, singling out for contempt all the empty forms of honoring the dead, as though death were fulfillment in itself, an event to him so basic and yet so total that any ritual by -which man attempts to honor it is neces­ sarily absurd. Death, at best, should remain an Intensely private exper­ ience, without ritual:

The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personnage, Imposing his separation, Calling for poop. Death is absolute and without memorial (p. 97).

Juxtaposed against the austerity of the fiddler's death is Rosembloom's funeral, whose pomp and circumstance Stevens does not hesitate to satir­ ize. Any public display of sobriety and compassion is, for Stevens, dis­ gusting. Better, then, to celebrate "The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (p. 6U).

Feeling neither compassion nor respect for the dead, the celebrants ga­ ther in "such dress/ As they are used to wear." The boys bring flowers in "last month's newspapers." Perhaps their Irreverence for the dead seems objectionable, but only initially, for Stevens quite emphatically asserts: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream? Life, and not death, is his sovereign. Through the imperative mode of verbs, the poet dictates precisely how he wishes the scene to be devised. The vulgar gaudiness and callous indifference for the dead is the very thing he would have celebrated to fortify ourselves against a non-human reality, our own death. Therefore, Stevens commands the people at the wake to

"call the roller of big cigars," to "let the wenches dawdle.*.," to'let the boys/ Bring flowers,"— in a word, to "letbebethe finale of seeing " 121 to let the Illusion of life he our only experience in the wake. When he instructs them, furthermore, to "T»ke...that sheet.../ And spread it so as to cover her face,” the command is not merely an acknowledgement of the prerogatives of basic decency; it also issues from the need to con­ ceal the dead woman in unrelieved rigor mortis. Indeed, she is to be covered not by a pale shroud, but a cloth "On which she embroidered fan- tails once," so that even the purity of white or the austerity of black is not terrifying. Finally, he conmands that the lamp "affix its beam," not on the dead woman, but rather on "the only emperor. • .the emperor of ice-cream.”

In his later poems Stevens learns to speak more kindly of the dead,

Indeed, the long poem "Examination of a Hero in Time of War" is one of his most sustained celebrations of the hero whose death is imminent. And in "Esthetlque du Mai," the elevatlohcof the rose-wound of the soldier is among the most moving parts of the poem. In Harmonium, however, it is life, and not death, that he wishes to celebrate. And that is why, of course, in this group of poems his view of God is the most cynical and brutal, and his view of heaven a mockery of Christian beliefs. In "Ne­ gation" (p. 91)> he writes: "The creator too is blind." Like man, God too is Imperfect, struggling unsisMsfully "toward his harmonious whole," unable to achieve a unified vision. The reason, of course, is that like the artist, he is selective and throws out what he doesn't want to deal with: "Horrors and falsities and wrong." But in the meantime, he fails to account for all the evil and death in the world. Our lives are the raw materials that go into his art; and he expunges whatever he doesn't like about us; for he is "Incapable master of all force." The creator,

Stevens Implies, desires perfection; but he Is "too vague" an: "Idealist,

overvhelmned/ By an afflatus that persists." In the meantime, unable to

protest at all, we stand before him helplessly passive, prepared to be

shaped Into "The evanscent symmetries/ From that meticulous potter's

thumb."

God turned Crispin-down Is Indeed a brutal image. However, none of

Stevens' views of God is quite as cynical as the one Implied In "Cy Est

Pourtralcte, Madame Ste Ursule, et Lea Unze Mllle Vlerges" (p. 21). Saint

Ursula, making a humble offering to God, gathers radishes and "flowers a-

round,/ Blue, gold, pink, and green? Addressing the Lord, she distinguish­

es the quality of her public offerings from the offering she now makes:

She said, 'My dear, Upon your altars, I have placed Ike marguerite and coquellcot, And roses, Frail as April snow; But here," she said, "Where none can see, I make an offering, In the grass, Of radishes and flowers."

But she fears God will not be pleased with them, as, Indeed, he is not:

"The Good Lord In His garden sought/ Hew leaf and shadowy tlnct,/ And they were all His thought." His response, thus, to her prayer has no

"heavenly love or pity." Why Ursula makes a private offering, why she chooses radishes and flowers and then trembles in fear lest the Lord be displeased, where she makes this offering, and when— all this has no clear detail. And deliberately, because Stevens is inventing an episode in a new legend of Saint Ursula which will be as apocryphal as all the others. 123

The last stanza has both closed and open meanings. It is true that

"This is not vrit/ In any hook." But because no other known version of the legend of Saint Ursula records it, it is not any the less valid or invalid than the parts and the whole of those legends. lhe history of the celebrated Ursula and the virgins of Cologne rests upon only ten lines and even the meaning of these lines is open to question. But the legend has flourished, grown in countless variants, in progressively more fabulous developments, even as scholars and men of the church from the middle ages on have expressed the most serious reservations about its authenticity.

Yet Stevens is not satirizing solely the apocryphal nature of the many versions of the legend. Clearly his purpose is not to tell how, when, why, where this event happened. Bather his purpose in this poem is to reveal a grotesque "theology." In a version of the medieval

French,to suggest yet another romance or picture on the familiar theme, the title reads: "Here is pictured Madame Saint Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins." Ursula's secret prayer, then, must have to do with their need for protection, whether they are now at Rome, at Cologne, or wherever. The legends and romances narrate that God grants them a large degree of protection, but eventually that they are all slaughtered.

StevenB does not suggest that God has turned a deaf ear to their prayers.

Much worse, he Implies that God is directly responsible for their martyr­ dom. As seen here, God has become petulant and idiotic, intent on satis­ fying only his whims and fancies. He is dissatisfied with what Ursula offers him. Radishes and flowers will not do for the connoisseur who 1214 -

requests "new leaf and shadowy tlnct." And therefore Ursula and all

eleven thousand virgins must perish, Thus, when Stevens concludes:

''This is not writ/ In any hook," ve know at once his final meaning. His

romance is not merely apocryphal hut blasphemous. Muted by a charming

imitation of the style of a medieval romance, purified of violence by

the simplicity of the narrative and the scrupulous selection of detail,

nonetheless the blasphemy that occurs in the fusion of the title, the narrative, and the description (each of the three parts of the poem) is horrible In its tranquil achievement.

While Stevens can never accede to celebrate the God of orthodoxy, he comes to realize that the idea of God is the purest poetic concept, and he strives to earn the right to ascend to God by trying to purify the mind as well as the body, until it becomes completely abstract, non-human. But at this point, he is too strongly attached to the body and the earth. For him there is no after-life. While at the end of his career, most of his efforts and wishes are directed to conjuring an image of heaven as a place and of the way one must follow to arrive at it, in Harmonium, his only vision of heaven , like his vision of God, is mocking and blasphemous.

Stevens addresses a high-toned old Christian woman (in a poem by the same name, P* 59) > "Madame," in mockery graced initially with respect. He tells her: "Poetry is the supreme fiction.” Poetry itself conjures an image of God and of heaven. Therefore, he implies, if she desires to believe in God, she must devise him first of all • It is not difficult to do, he says: One has only to "Take the moral law and make a nave of it/ And from the nave build haunted heaven." But the nave by Itself, although 125 it m y be tbe principle part of the church, will not do, for it suggests that heaven is empty, "haunted," with "windy citherns hankering for hymns"— unstrummed because there are no angels there to make the music.

As though to dupe her, he continues: "We agree in principle. That's clear." Now that he has provided a place for the "conscience,” the

"moral law," satirically he begins to take account of "She opposing law,” by which "our bawdiness,/ Unpurged by epitaph," will be "indulged at last," Our lustful desires metamorphosed into palms, like our pious consciences, lodge themselves not in "the bad place,” but rather in heaven, "Squiggling like saxaphones." Therefore, 'ftadame, we are where we began," that is, here on earth.

His perversity at this point runs wild, as he forgets the conscience and its heavenly abode to describe heavenly beings as he conceives of them,-;here the Christian flagellants turned "disaffected, well-stuffed."

Their mortifications of the flesh are absurdly out of character, although not with his satire of them: "smacking their muzzy bellies in parade," not meek but rather "Proud of such novelties of the sublime," whipping from themselves not penitent mea culpas but rather "A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres." Acknowledging with undeniable pleasure that she is shocked by his burlesque description, he asserts the Irrepressible freedom of "fictlve things" to invent as they will, to submit to no pious laws that old widows would wish to impose on them. In this witty, blasphemous monologue, the speaker succeeds in shocking a respectable, stuffy, pious widow whose sole consolation and certainty, we might expect, is that she will soon join her husband in a heaven she conceives of as "the good place.” early stages of his career Stevens himself might well have resembled

the monocled uncle; and the monocled uncle himself might well resemble I

the unruffled man at Vesuvius. But by the time one reaches "Transport

to Summer," Stevens himself has very emphatically detached himself from

either one. For both are seeking to save themselves. But Stevens, in

the meantime, is attempting to perfect himself as a human being, even as

he knows full well that the denials inherent in the process of self-puri­

fication may well succeed in destroying him.

There is something beyond Stevens' spiritual quests that I find

intensely beautiful and valuable in his poetry. That is, of course,

his humanity and warmth. By that I mean all those qualities we admire

in human beings: his seriousness leavened by humor and sympathy; his

eternal love affair with the world— that discloses a man who is healthy

enough to love and to give of himself generously and to receive the

Vorld as though it were a beautiful woman; the austerity of his formid­ able mind and goals humanized in many of his poems by a deliberately

colloquial air and jauntiness; his love of everyone who is life-giving, and his distrust of all those people who are artificial, cold, sterile, unreal because detached from nature and love; his desire to arrive at

God and his iconoclastic air that makes his temperament in an age of disbelief so believable, so easy to identify with; the sanity and wis­ dom of his commitments— all expressed with impeccable taste and modesty; a gentleness that implies a fear of authority and his fear lest he too be taken as being more of an authority than he wishes to be. Above all, he is most to be admired for his freedom. 126

The poetic intention of "A High-toned Christian Woman,” then, la not

merely to construct a vision of heaven as an exercise in the freedom

and imagination of poetry, but to mock the Christian heaven.

While the heavenly beings may be a disgusting lot in this witty

poem, poetry^ even if it is Intent only on mocking, has managed to con­

ceive as heaven as a place and to conceive of lusty and sensual beings

there. 33iat is to say, of course, that the absolute Is humanistically,

If grotesquely, conceived. When Stevens writes seriously, and not mock*

lngly, of the state of being after death in Harmonium, it is conceived

grimly, austerely, as nothingness. In these poems, the continuity be­

tween life on earth and the state of things after death is conceived of as being ruptured. And the absolute comes to be mirrored not la friend­

ly and familiar forms but in strange and frigid images. The poem "Nu­ ances of a Theme by Williams" (p. 18) forecasts the late poem "less and

Less Human, 0 Savage Spirit" (p. 327), in conceiving of God as a non­ human being:

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze, Haat reflects neither my face nor any Inner part Of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

Lend no part to any hunanlty that suffuses you in its own light. Be not chimera of morning. Half-man, half-star. Be not an intelligence, Like a widow*s bird Or an old horse.

For Stevens, that remote star, a manifestation of the absolute, seems at times to have a benevolent connection with human lives, as he implies in

"Homonculus et La Belle Etolle" (p. 27), when he calls it "the ultimate 127

Plato,/ Tranquillizing with, this jewel/ The torments of confusion." But when the absolute Is conceived most anti-humanistically, then It exists as a thing completely apart from man, protecting him from nothing, offer­ ing him nothing, so that when man dies he experiences only nothingness, powerfully evoked In "The Snow Man" (P. 9)/ where man is perfected not into an angel, but unto death.

To know the absolute as non-human being, one must try to experience it, to "have a mind of winter/ To regal'd the frost and the boughs/ Of the pinetrees crusted with snow." Surfaces, trusted," impenetrable, frozen,

"glitter" In the distant January sun. But to perceive the surfaces is not enough. One must lose all feeling and thought, "not to think/ Of any misery In the sound of the wind." The repetition of "nothing" and

"not" makes for a driving negation, a relentless pounding away at life.

The spirit of negation, however, Is generally not as Insistent in most of the later poems In Harmonium as it is in "Ohe Snow Man" and as it comes to be In his final poems. Rather it is more subtly expressed, as reason begins almost Imperceptibly to corrode the apollonlan vision of humanity; little by little the materials of life are gradually shaped into tragedy. Will and desire strive to sustain a vision of nobility, beauty, Immortality, which Is corroded by the necessity of having to ex­ perience disillusionment, evil, and death. Of all the poams in Harmon­ ium, "Sunday morning" and "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" anticipate the sublime and tragic vision of the final poems. The intimations of the dionyslan I view in the early poems forecast the enormous range of emotions and ex­ periences of Steven's poetry after Harmonium. 128

"C fetalt ma foi, la nonchalance divine"

Dl8llluslon comes to the lady In "Sunday Morning" (p. 67), not in

the winter, but serenely In the comforts, the "Complacencies of the

peignoir, and late/ Coffee and oranges In a sunny chair." She does not

see reality In the "junipers shagged vlth Ice (p. 10), but rather in

the "green freedom of a cockatoo/ Upon a rug." The vibrant force min­

gles in her mind "to dissipate" the gloomy subject of her speculation,

"The holy hush of ancient sacrifice." It Is the morbid speculation of

religion as death that her Imagination, eroded by reason, gives rise to.

She recalls the death and burial of Christ and marshals the sensuous

things about her to participate In the funeral procession.

She dreams a little and she feels the dark Encroachment of that old catastrophe, As a calm darkens among vater-llghts. The pungent oranges and bright, green vings Seem things in some procession of the dead Winding across vide vater, vithout sound. The day Is like vide vater, vithout sound, Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet Over the seas, to silent Palestine, Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

The sensuous and the ascetic are fused. Season and Imagination jointly participate In the same activity and lose their dlstinctiveness. She neither resists nor desires such fusion. For she almost seems to doze off, suggested by the increasing stillness, the repetition of the phrase

"vithout sound.” The assaults of reason are muted, therefore, indeed not even distinctly observable, so that almost vithout her even having real­ ized it, reason has austerely, serenely directed the imagination tovard a conclusion that she herself comes In the second stanza to resist cpenly. She is being led to the grave of Jesus, a place she resists, because she seems 129 to see it as the ^Dominion of the "blood and the sepulchre." Yet she seems to feel a pleasure in being transported In revery bach twenty cen­ turies and like Christ Himself, she walks over the nvlde water...Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet."

She wants so much to resist articulating certain truths: first, that heaven cannot resemble earth in all of its sensuous beauty; second, that indeed, there is no heaven in the first place, because the soul is not im­ mortal; finally, it was Jesus the man who was burled, and Christ was never resurrected. The knowledge of these truths comes to her ever so gradually, however. It is as though her angelic double were trying gently to dis­ close the truth she must come to accept. Unwilling to hurt her, it prods her ever so tenderly so that she can discover the truth for herself. The necessary angel, then, is like "Vocallssimus" in "Two Figures in Dense

Violet Night" (p. 113), vi10m the lady addresses: "What syllable are you seeking,/ Vocallssimus,/ In the distances of sleep?/ Speak it." In "Sun* day Morning" Vocallssimus begins to lead her to a starker barer reality, neither by describing it, nor by telling her why she must come to know it.

Rather in the second stanza she is not reprimanded for what she desires.

In fact, she is told that her desires are perfectly legitimate. She is not Informed of this in statements, but rather she is addressed in rhe­ torical questions which, when she chooses to answer them herself, dis­ close that her desires are unrealistic. Why indeed, Vocallssimus asks, should she invest all of her energies into conjuring the image of a hea­ ven that in the last analysis will only express what she neither wishes to know, nor, in fact, what can do her any good? lhe Implication, of 130

course. Is that she really does not have to believe in an austere heaven

In the firBt place. Perhaps at one point during her meditation she felt

guilty about not desiring to tolerate the austere aspects of Christianity.

Nov, of course, she is absolved of the necessity of believing anything at all. She herself can decide what she wants to believe.

Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Brings to be cherished as the thought of heaven?

Joy must come for her, not in the thought of death, but in conceiving of life and of herBelf, as being part human, part divine. In the first stanza she identifies herself with Christ walking over the water; now, having renounced "her bounty to the dead,” she comes to believe more strongly in herself.

Divinity must live within herself: Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievlngs in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Bnotlons on wet roads on autumn nights.

She can believe only in that religion which permits her to stand at the center, as a goddess.

But in the third stanza's meditation, she makes less extravagant claims; for she herself is, after all, not divine. Unlike her, "Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth./ No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave/ Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.” Her dreaming mind passes silently through centuries condensing the history of religion into five brief lines: 131

He moved among us, as a muttering king, Magnificent, vould move among his hinds, Until our blood, commingling, virginal, With heaven, brought such requital to desire The very hinds discerned it, In a star (pp. 67-68).

Jove becomes the Christian God; "our blood.••virginal" comes to be both

Leda and Mary. "Commingling...with heaven," the virgins bring "requi­

tal to desire," so that the miracle Is perceived even by the "hinds." '.v

33ie recurrence In the historical pattern Implies that the miracle, the man-god, has gradually expired, even If from time to time, he has been b o m anew. For, otherwise, Jove would not have been replaced by God,

nor would Mary have followed Leda. But, In the following lines, she

implies that Mary as well as Leda no longer exists as a living force.

This knowledge foreshadows the truth she Is told in the end: that Jesus, the man, died and that Christ no longer can be believed In. Placing her­ self as always at the center of her speculations, she wonders whether she will take Mary's place: "Shall our blood fall? Or shall it come to be/

The blood of paradise?” If her blood does not fall— If her view of par­ adise becomes real— then she will devise a religion that will make "the earth" "Seem all of paradise that we know." Therefore,

The sky will be much friendlier then than now, A part of labor and a part of pain, And next In glory to enduring love, Not this dividing and Indifferent blue.

For her, heaven, ideally speaking, Is to be friendly and familiar— and not remote, cold, austere, unfeeling. It is, furthermore, to be embossed •’ with sensuous details so that "wakened birds/ Before they fly” can "test the reality/ Of misty fields, by their sweet questions." Questioning will always be sweet, since the birds can depend upon the reality which exists, 132

ready to be tested, and proven substantial. Yet her own questioning

comes gradually to darken.

But when the birds are gone, and their warn fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?

This new question might implicitly require her to believe in a par­

adise, even when it is not sensuous and human. But the thought is op­

pressive and her angelic double emphatically discloses what she herself

vould desire to affixm.

There is not any haunt of prophecy, Bor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured As April's green endures; or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

And once again, she herself is elevated, as in the three proceeding stan­

zas, when, pampered by her double, she is told that "her remembrance," her memory is enduring, Indeed, more permanent than paradise (eternity) Itself!

But as though she really could not sustain such belief in herself for too long, her initial view of paradise expressed in that stanza grimly as the

"haunt of prophecy" and "old chimera of the grave" comes gradually to be benevolent and ethereal ("the golden underground," "isle^Ielodious") and finally once again, as she herself desires it to be: ripe and physical,

"visionary south," "cbudy palm." So that by the end of that stanza, the antagonism between two views of heaven— one austerely real, non-human, the other, ripely real, human— disappears altogether since heaven for her once again seems warm and inviting and inspires confidence and con­ tentment. She is not altogether quieted, however; nor 1b she really convinced that ,fher remembrance" of the earth will endure forever. For in stanza

V, "She says, 'But in contentment I still feel/ The need of some imper­ ishable bliss.'" Now, for the first time, she utters the word "death."

Far from having the "mind of winter," however, she defines death as "the mother of beauty," Death, the mother, Mary, Leda, "our blood...virginal," and finally she herself are all Identified, as she entangles herself in the midst of argument from which it seems she may never emerge. She ne­ ver observes that death will put an end to all desire. Bather she claims that from death "Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams/ And our de> sires." Hie egocentrlclty of her plea is somewhat camouflaged by the pronoun "our," but it is clear that her own desires for life lead her to say not that death entails first illness and then decay, but that it brings sensuous and sensual fulfillment. Season is strong enough to check her desires: ?She strews the leaves/ Of sure obliteration on our paths/

The path sick sorrow took." But the strength of her desire for life makes her cast the austere image of death aside, to think of death tenderly:

"the many paths/ Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love/ Whispered a little out of tenderness."

But once she speculate s seriously upon the pain that permanence gives rise to, the image of the earth made perfect comes to frustrate her. For what Is fixed cannot indeed achieve fulfillment, frozen as it is in pos­ tures which arrest the search for fulfillment, far before desire is ever satisfied. do the boughs Hang always heavy In that perfect shy, Undhanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

If the earth elevated Into paradise ceases to change, then life will be unendurable. Therefore, why elevate earth in the first place?

"Why set the pear upon those river-banks/ Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?N Why indeed! Isn't this precisely what she has been trying to do all along? Yet now that it has happened, she does not want to sanction an extension of earth to paradise. It Is as though, for a moment, the idea of paradise was there waiting to be created solely by her! Absurd! Ho, she decides, she will not have paradise look like that. For, how disappointing It would be if "they should wear our colors there,/ The silken weavlngs of our afternoons,/

And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!" The implication, of course, is that their colors, silken weavlngs, and lutes are much more beauti­ ful and vivid than those on earth. Rather than conceive of heaven as an austere and empty place, she has perfected earth's sensuous beauty, trying to imagine it in earth's Idealized image. What will that image be for her? At the end of stanza VI, we see her, the new blessed vir­ gin, the new mother of beauty, "mystical,/ Within whose burning bosom we devise/ Our earthly mothers, waiting, sleeplessly."

And in the seventh stanza, the image of heaven and earth Is final­ ly achieved by her, the mystical wedding of man and god, her blood (im­ agination) singing a new chant. It is a religion, pagan, wild, one that liberates vast reserves of power and energy. The god, "naked among 135 them, like a savage source" is indeed "their chant"of paradise, "re­

turning to the sky" from where it came. Her religion will celebrate

the sun impregnating the imagination, so that the Imagination itself

soars once again back to the sky. It is a view, Indeed, of art as miracle, as intercessor between man and the divine. The chant (ab­

straction) springs from the mind and heart, shoots skyward. The im­ agination, then, blooded by the sun, will define heaven, and once a- gain return to earth, as it "enters, voice by voice,/ Tke windy lake wherein their lord delights..." God, then, will exist not remote, un­ friendly, beyond that dividing and indifferent blue, but among man,

immanent in nature. Ofeere will be a harmony between heaven and earth, and a continuity between this life and eternity so that "The dew upon their feet shall manifest" (shall be a sign of) the paths that those who die take. Heaven, then, will have no secrets. And sensuous real­ ity will offer us everything we desire to believe in.

3hat is the real fulfillment she craves. But her imagination has plunged too far into the unreal. And that is why she must be summoned rudely back to things as they are.

She hears upon that water without a stand, A voice that cries, 'The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.1

Christianity is not a matter "of coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,"

"the porch of spirits.” It Involves nothing less final than death and nothingness. Christ never existed in the first place, but only the man

Jesus, who lived and died like all other men. The fact is, then, that But his insistence upon being a free spirit might well have seemed

destructive and austere had he not been determined to liberate everyone

and everything else apart from himself. Perhaps one might conclude by

saying that everything he believed in was starkly opposed to a cannibal­

istic view of life. For him the highest value is life itself. And that meant that one must have confidence in the world, must believe that it is beautiful and life-giving. His purpose was, therefore, not to contain meaning, to fix life, to subjugate everything and everyone about him.

Rather he valued most highly love and freedom. For in spite of all his experiences to the contrary, he never ceased to have faith that, once discovered, the final truth would liberate everyone for all time and grant man eternal life and freedom. 136 there never was a God, an author, and that "unsponsored," ve live "in an old chaos of the sun." We are "free," hut freedom is, as Stevens points out so veil in Ideas of Order, dark, agonizing, rather than ec­ statically fulfilling. For freedom is the knowledge of death, "Of that vide vater, Inescapable" (my italics). With the knowledge of these truths, vhat, then, is the lAdy going to do?

Indeed, it is now the real world— one of beauty mingled by deso­ lation, solitude, purified of any Illusory, divine purpose— that she accepts, neither vigorously endorsing it, nor emphatically affirming her belief in it. She says quietly with an austerity of her own that it is "ours." At first she does not really desire to understand vhat

Vocallssimus has told her. She feels a wave of depression, as though the imagination had been strlken: Imaged by the "casual flocks of pi­ geons" making "undulations" that are "ambigious." In their uncertain flight they imply desire, still straining feebly in spite of that aus­ tere w)ice intoning from distances, to d i n g to something affirmative.

The spirit falls by degrees like a leaf falling slowly to the ground*

And finally the pigeons "sink,/ Downward to darkness, on extended wings•"

For Stevens as well as for the lady in "Sunday Morning" art comes to be conceived idealistically as Intercessor between man and God, as the chant rising up to heaven, as abstraction taking the place of an over-human god whom he really cannot believe in. But the lady's vision of heaven lsd>stract only because the hymn itself Is non-sensuous and not because it would describe a place that is non-sensuous. For her heaven and earth harmonize; she avoids trying to imagine vhat beings in 137 paradise are like; rather she describes a boisterous group of pagans worshipping the sun. But Just the same in her Imagined, idealized version of heaven, the origin and destiny of man, as well as the path the dead must take is manifested sensuously.

Stevens hoped to create the poem which would define heaven and re­ late man meaningfully with it. It was, as he himself knew, an extrava­ gantly ambitious goal. And, of course, he never succeeded, as he realized.

Whenever he speaks of it at all, his idea of heaven comes to be increas­ ingly rarefied, non-sensuous. It comes to be located somewhere near that indifferent and dividing blue. He tries to study the nuances of the co­ lors of the sky, striving little by little to do the very thing that he accuses the "nabob of bones" of doing in his later poems: Brushing away the clouds to arrive at the neutral center. Striving to arrive at the absolute, he comes to see it in the following ways: (1) as nothingness, expressed in "3%e Snow Man;" (2) as the neutral center condemned by him primarily because of the kinds of withered souls who engage in its study; and (3) abstraction as ultimate purification, devoutly desired, which he conceives of achieving with utmost humility. The instinct to conceive of the absolute is awakened when death comes to oppress him. For when the body becomes an old animal, then he seems almost glad to savor the faint­ est pastels in the sky, and not blooded reality.

The uncle in "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (p. 13), is an artist of an altogether different order than the lady in "Sunday Morning." While she desires to experience strong and powerful emotions,

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow; Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued Elations when the forest blooms; gusty Baotlons on wet roads on autumn nights (p. 69), 138 he vould crave the muted and intense harmony of a quasi-monastic rela­ tionship vith art. And that is vhy in the beginning of the poem, the uncle vents an anger bordering on disgust for the "frizzled" manner of the amorous woman by his side, who wants his declaration of love to be wildly demonstrative. Instead of beginning, "For God's sake!”, he ci­ vilizes the tone of invective, adding Insult to injury by being hyper- bollcally romantic: "Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,/ 0 sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon." Then, as though to drive his point home brutally, Immediately after the exaggerated romance follow a series of negatives which are clearly meant to destroy any possibility of romance, to remove any lingering doubts as to the mocking intention of those ini­ tial apostrophes: "There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,/ Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.” Confirming the meaning and intent of his statement to her, he continues: "And so I mocked her in magnificent measure"— taking vain pride in his mockery qf her "flam- beaued manner."

Then, half-aware that his passionate contempt for her might have little to do essentially with her, he turns his mockery against himself in a probing question that abruptly mutes the wicked triumph of his ri­ dicule. His self-dissatisfaction turns quietly from ridicule to the ex­ pression of a wish to be elsewhere, something else: "I wish that I might be a thinking stone." And the sincerity— or magic— of his wish en­ ables him gradually to achieve meditation, at first superficial, later profound: first his thought is "spuming thought" on the surface of the vater; later, from its deeper sources, it is "A deep up-pouring from 139

some saltier veil." It Is thought, then, that becomes the substance of

this poem, as meditation becomes his understanding of his present situ­ ation as well as a dim apprehension of vhat the future holds for him.

His thoughts center around love he experienced some time ago. The reas*

sertion of this memory of love is Identified vlth the voman he mocked a moment ago. It returns like "The radiant bubble that she vas."

The second part, vhich is one of the most elusive of the poem, pro­ jects his evolving thoughts symbolically, as a "red bird" vhlch "seeks out his choir." A torrent of song and memory vill fall "from him vhen he finds"...vhat? ve are led to ask. Supposedly his chant, his subject.

Yet such knovledge can come only if he continues the meditation and the probing: "Shall I uncrumple this much-crumpled thing!" Thereupon he attempts to describe himself and the nature of his memory surging into consciousness as choirs of vlnd and rain. He states that he is no long­ er very young; In fact, he is forty, old enough to have "heirs." He greets the spring, therefore, not vlth joy and affirmation, but vlth a detachment that breeds cynicism and mockery. For "These choirs of vel- come choir for me a farevell." But fate is Ironic as veil as bitter; for the voman by his side is forcing him to celebrate spring and youth, and the.plain fact Is that he knovs "No spring can follov past meridian," and that he cannot pretend that he Is a young rake.

Although he says nothing to her, he grandiloquently imagines vhat he vould tell her if he felt free to speak. In part II, he finds a re­ markably expansive metaphor in.human hair, vhose erotic associations fuse vonderfully veil vlth a nev admonishment, here the ancient theme of the transitoriness of all things. He would almost begin a series of ubi sunt?, but no, he will "not play the flat historic scale." Although his theme is clearly vanltas van!taturn, he rejects the conventional means to give it expression, as later, in part IX, he will abhor the manner of the "fops of fancy? when, in a mock-heroic outburst, he seeks a model for a love lyric. Man's scrupulous care to make himself at­ tractive and desirable, his amour-propre, achieves complex expression: it is, at once, the object of his pity, his contempt, and his fear.

At first, knowledge and power in love are symbolized by hair; the sen­ suous, that is, is identical with an abstract ideal of love. When the sensuous world disappears or decays, as far as the uncle is concerned, the Ideal decays as well."Without pity on these studious ghosts,"— the old Chinese, Utamaro's beauties, the women of Bath with their "mountain­ ous coiffures,” "all the barbers"— she comes, then, "dripping in your hair from sleep." For him the power that corrodes love, his own deep scepticism, is the only force that endures; in the meantime, the mani­ festations of love, which he has identified with the power and Joy of loving, are enfeebled in him, finally to disappear. The conclusion to this meditation comes elegantly, somewhat facetiously: "...not one curl in nature has survived.”

When he asks "Why, without pity on these studious ghosts,/ Do you come.,?'* what he means is not really pity for them, but pity for him­ self. For the demands she imposes upon him become Impossible, since they make him acutely aware of his own subjugation to the laws of change and decay. Although he uses the vanity of human wishes, the lessons of mut- ikl ability against her demands as a means of self-protection, yet it seems throughout that he fears and loathes most to be reminded of change, de­ cay, and death. Nov we know why, although aroused and moved by her, he responds to her mockingly and in anger. The aesthetic limitations he feels in than both— bordering often upon aesthetic revulsion— conceals a more elemental fear, so powerful and constant with him that only once is it fully uncontrolled: "Anguishing hour.'"

The monocled uncle has tried to imagine himself rather elegantly, casually, cruelly mocking the lady’s petition for love. It seems, given his mockery, that he has accepted reality and can gaze with complete de­ tachment at himself in a mirror that reflects a thickening, vrlnkllng image of himself. He is, after all, the one who sees than for what they are: two "warty squashes, streaked and rayed." He seems to be vlser, calmer than she. For the woman, apparently untutored in the lavs of life and love, persists in her demands because she is unenlightened. And he, conceiving of himself vith a pompous air as a scholar and a rabbi, would think of himself as her mentor silencing her petition. Tet the calm philosophy he would offer her is motivated not by the desire to educate her, nor by the wish to retreat from her. Most of all her petition has reminded him of the decline of his own powers and this is the fact that he cannot tolerate.

He does not reject her (and himself) because he is beyond temptation, serenely indifferent, Learned as he tells himself that he is, vise in objectivity, realistic to the point where his fearlessness dazzles in brutally apt images of themselves, yet he is, in short, afraid. The 1^2

poem's truth, then, does not rest In the act of silencing the woman's

petition, of accommodating her to the lavs of change and decay that

have ravaged their love as they will one day their whole "being, but

rather of accosmodatlng himself to the truths he can articulate so

well* It Is he who cannot accept them; her presence, her petition

is therefore, all the more annoying, anguishing, for it makes impossible

any temporary pause to the war raging within him. The poem, thus, plots

an attempt at composure, at tranquility that comes with the noble ac­

ceptance of one's condition.

The transltorlness of sensuous delights— of love Itself— is bru­

tally expressed in part IV. Coming upon a new metaphor, one that is more

vegetable and sensed more immediately as an object of decay than human

hair (and one, not being a human feature that he can imagine, therefore,

more violently, more concretely assaulted by decay), he speculates on

that time when love was appropriate, possible. Combining suggestions

of the erotic with ripeness and fertility, his metaphor turns from associ­

ations of pleasure to a grotesque variation on the kind of knowledge the

fruit of life, once plucked and eaten, will invariably reveal: mortality

and decomposition. With refined sadism, he makes his point violently yet obliquely:

An apple serves as well as any skull To be the book in which to read a round And Is as excellent, in that it is composed Of what, like skulls, comes rotting back to ground.

The elaborate amplification of the predicate is deliberately confusing: are we hearing about apples, skulls, books, rounds? Bather, about death and decomposition, not vegetable but human, with horror at once muted 143

(the metaphor Is an apple) and heightened (trivialized, skulls are se­

condary to apples in the internal order of the metaphor). Holding in­

tently to his metaphor, he compounds horror by returning to the theme

of love: "...as the fruit/ Of love, it is a book too mad to read..."

Love supplies a better analogy than skulls for his point, which is that

love ccmes and goes, as it were, in a season; once gone, it leaves less

of a reminder of Itself than a skull, indeed, as much as an apple. Love

is "too mad” to contemplate "Before one merely reads to pass the time:”

here he civilizes his violence, brings the horror into control by trivial­

izing that final defeat he can anticipate with certainty— a merely no­

minal existence, a symptom of the workings of detachment that is perfected

in death.

Continuing his point in part V, that love is more transitory than our

other pleasures, he grows less violent, more explicit. The "Furious star”

of the evening burns "for fiery boys" and "sweet-smelling virgins", but

not for them. The image of fiery youth brings into yet further relief

the total depletion of old age. Feeling, for those who are young and

old, is light; for youth, that light is a star burning itself out. But

for the two of them that brilliant gleaming point dwindles to flickering

fireflies. In the twinkling of an eye, the limitless energy of the burn*

ing star catastrophically peters, out to the fragile dot of light that

fireflies make.

Fart VI begins as a palliative to that terrible fall. "If men at forty will be painting lakes..," The monocled uncle must believe that

through art he will be able to enjoy a sense of union and harmony with Ikk

"something other." Since, however, the hlues are "ephemeral," he Is driven to search for an unchanging substance so that "The ephemeral blues will merge...In one,/ The basic slate,/ The universal hue." He cannot be certain that his dream will come true. All he knows is that it simply must come true. His dream for art, the lordly study of the final stanza, therefore, is Interwoven in his imagined exhortation to the woman. Searching for the "basic slate,” he argues that he cannot expect that love will disclose what that substance is. For love is too frantic,

"quirky,” spasmodic. Coming quickly, love Is so turbulent that it cannot even be described. Thus the utter folly of Imagining that human love is a real and therefore essential union rather than an illusory one. He thinks: love is not for someone like myself; "It is a theme for Hyacinth alone.” For Hyacinth died prematurely, before he grew old and sick and tired of love.

The contrasting Images of virile youth and fatigued age recur in the parable;: of the following section. Here the contrast is rendered by sounds: the "tinkling bells" of the muleteers as against the guffawing centurions beating "Their shrilling tankards on the table-boards.” As though conceding the obscurity (and weakness) of the parable, he attempts a reading of it. His translation, however, is not really very clear, since one riddle that is rather "flambeaued” Is substituted for another.

This is nevertheless Just another version of the same message that has been beating in his head all along. Since his argumentative mood has gi­ ven way to a fanciful one, he continues, irresponsibly: "Suppose these courrlers brought amid their train/ A damsel heightened by eternal bloom." ll*5

Where? Into a world of luety centurions? Then what? But the play of

fancy Is temporary; he returns vlth fresh Inventions on his familiar

theme.

What follows, In part VIII, is a description of them as decaying fruit: "Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.” In this analogy we hear morbid echoes of "the fruit of love." But his cruel objecti­ vity has not reached its climax. Mocking himself and her, he Imagines

Inviting her to celebrate the "faith of forty.” His bitterness and

irony grown cutting and bolstarous , he Imagines himself addressing her as "Most venerable hesrt." His mock-respect for her (as though she were an antique) is made all the more sadistic as he at once echoeB the precious diction with which he mocked the style of her petition at the

very beginning and makes scurrilous sexual allusions at the same time.

"MoBt venerable heart, the lustiest conceit/ Is not too lusty for your broadening.” His celebration of Cupid grown old Is absurdly forced, veritable "magnificent measure.” Emphasizing the absurdity of their love songs, he heroicly exaggerates the pains he takes to compose a good love poem: "I quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything." He has no in­ tention, of course, of even writing such a poem. But even if he did, what poets would his models be?

Clearly not, part X indicates, "the fops of fane#" who, as they wax sublime in their verse, enjoy base pleasures, when they "...in their poetry leave/ Memorabilia of the mystic spouts,/ Spontaneously watering their gritty soils." Their poetic discharge is a seminal discharge, dis­ guised, glossed over as "memorabilia”— as sex Is idealized extravagantly, CHAPTER I

REALITY AS THE SUPREME FICTION

"The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" (1942), "The Figure of

the Youth as Virile Poet" (19^) j "Imagination as Value" (19^9)* and

"A Collect of Philosophy" (1951) manifest the development of Stevens'

theory of art. That theory, like the beliefs in which it is grounded,

is formulated as the series of definitions of "the supreme fiction"

which he put into the poem by that name: it must be abstract; it must

change; it must give pleasure. The general tendency among critics has

been to understand Stevens' poetry by these principles and to read his prose pieces as philosophical essays. Distortion of both his prose

and poetry perforce follows. Although in "Notes toward a Supreme Fic­

tion" his beliefs are articulated distinctly, before that time they are

discussed in spurts, one definition about to dissolve in the onrushing

of another thought. To read his art in terms of the final definition

of the supreme fiction is to imply both that his art is essentially

static and that "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" expresses Stevens' final statement of belief, whereas indded, in as much as he does make a final statement, it appears in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven."

Stevens' thought evolves through various phases, as we have already observed. Ihere are various themes alluded to in "The Noble Rider...," for example, that are explicitly discussed in the later essays. To see

Stevens' thought in the process of evolving is therefore to read each essay and poem as parts of a larger whole, and not to read each prose piece as a philosophical essay, where the ideas are unalterably defined 1k 6 unreallstlcally, in their poems. Most contemptuously, he suggests in the following line ("spontaneously watering their gritty soils"), the fair-foul dichotomy of love that lyric poets so notoriously lgnorec in their poetic treatments of love. Dissociating himself unconditionally from these love poets, he proposes that, despite his ignorance of all the symbols and rituals of fertility, yet he knows "a tree that hears/

A semblance to the thing I have in mind." The huge phallic symbol de­ scribed casually could for him appropriately symbolize the generative force, the life-prlnclple that is at the core of love.

Having revealed how bound he is to 'those properties of life he would like to appear he has mastered, he begins, in part XI, almost to concede that she is right after all, but characteristically withdraws, as if catching himself from the lure of elemental forces he can conjure vividly because he can still feel them. The argument here, then, is that if sex were all there were to love, to feel love would be no pro­ blem. If the image of the phallic tree reveals that the sexual instinct is still powerfully alive in him, the disparaging verbs of this section express the degree to which he will hold himself in control— "trembling band*" "make us squeak like dolls," "pinching gestures forth." The enjoyment that they could derive from sex is bitterly qualified by "that first, foremost law" of mutability which makes love unaesthetlc. Char­ acteristically, he would Invert a comforting homily: it is better not to have loved than to have loved and lost. In the description of the pool that follows, a highly artificial atmosphere that corresponds to their strained attempt to feel young, beautiful, and in love when they ivr are not, a frog booms "from his very belly odious chords," themselves the truth of his chant.

The last part is perhaps the most difficult to understand in the poem. It marks the change of subject from love, from their specific situation, to pigeons circling the sky. The pigeons recall the birds that come to the gigantic tree in part X. When in part II, he sees a red bird that seeks out its choir, he asks himself: "Shall I uncruxn- ple this much-crumpled thing?" Shall I, that is, attend to and under­ stand this thing? The bird is his remembrance of love (the origin of love) which is associated with the involuntary memory of "The radiant bubble that she was," of part I. The memory of the bird, the woman as a young girl, the bubble from the bottom of the "saltier well" which

"bursts its watery syllable," which speaks for the first time— all are associated: those circling the sky, those "grown tired of flight," those that fall to the ground.

With that, his meditations on the present situation— his possible ansver to the lady, transformed into an imagined harangue against her and himself— come to an end. Qhe goal he deBlred most of all was to find some way of escaping the "pressures of reality” made so concrete by the woman dinging to him, waiting desperately for some fine words.

What he wanted to do was to blast both of them. What he has done is to hdd his peace. He Imagined himself telling her again and again that they are two "gourds, distended...splashed with frost,/...turned grotesque."

Except for the first two lines of the poem, however, he keeps his tem­ per. But invective, not fully vented, boomerangs. Whereas the anger 1 W vented might have Immediately provided him a means of escape, his si­ lence has protracted his own discomfort in repeated images of the gro­ tesque that cane to he turned against himself as well as her. As his temper builds up, we anticipate a climax; that is, ve expect that at one point he will explode in fury and without sparing the blowB, finally tell her precisely what has been going through his mind.

But why does the climax never come? There are a number of answers which, 1 think, may well be sustained in terms of the meanings expressed throughout the poem. First, the Impotence of his rage may well be a symbolic forecast of the decline in his sexual power. Second, he might, as the true connoisseur of beauty, realize that argument Itself is un- aesthetlc and that the only way out of it is to change the subject.

Third, his wish is to retreat from the unaesthetic aspects of sex, com­ plicated by the fear he experiences at the thought of growing old and not being able to enjoy love. This wish to escape from sex and desire, to remain the young lover might indeed be fulfilled in the symhllc reunion with the world through art. The tranquility he achieves in the end may, therefore, indeed be genuine. For In stanza VI, he has been speculating about the "universal hue” there waiting to be painted.

The fact is, however, that the tranquility in the final stanza is only imagined, and not real.

Like a dark rabbi, I Observed, when young, the nature of mankind, In lordly study. Everyday, I found Man proved a gobbet in my mincing world. Like a rose rabbi, later, I pursued, And still pursue, the origin and course Of love, but until now I never knew That fluttering things have so distinct a shade. He speculates upon the pursuits in his life as though at one stage, when he was young, he meditated upon "the nature of mankind," and then later, having renounced that vision, he decided to "pursue the origin and course of love" and now finally In the present meditation, he has come to real­ ize "fluttering things have so distinct a shade," the artist's fulfill­ ment In nuances of colors. But he has not yet achieved that final stage.

The noble and serene conclusion, then, Is just as Imagined as was his lecture to the lady. The facts which were too harsh to be spoken to her finally become too harsh to be endured by him. And so he must gloss over the realities by calling his study "lordly," and himself "a rose rabbi."

"Le Monocle...,1' then, Is a tour de force of anguish, elegance, mockery, hilarious wit, pathos, comedy. The uncle is a rather pitiable figure, and yet, because he Is trapped in an impossible situation which he has decided to tolerate with the most civil patience and endurance, a comic figure as well. Furthermore, he Is not as pathetic as his an­ guish for his lost youth would seem to indicate. For his imagination is vital enough to conceive of thunderous phrases. Like Prufrock, he too is afraid. But, unlike Frufrock, he never says: how should 1 presume?

He knows very well how he would presume. But he Is elegant enough to believe perhaps that nothing whatsoever is accomplished by violence.

And therefore, he is still In command of his elegant posture, solaced, no doubt by the fact that one woman, however frizzled and flambeaued, thinks that he is attractive enough to desire. In his own imagination, therefore, he sees himself as both a lordly rabbi and as the gigantic 150

tree, indifferent "To...all birds (vhlch) come sometime in their time,"

a tree that outlasts the birds vhen they fade away, fluttering before him, there to be observed by him in a detached and bemused mood. "But vhen they go that tip still tips the tree." In the end, therefore, he

is Insulated from stark pathos by his own grandiloquent airs, and lordly dreams of an everlasting union with art.

The tranquility achieved in "be Monocle..," — as delightful as it

seems— 1^ however,too transitory, indeed too hypocritical, to be the grounds of final belief. For a satisfactory conclusion must be genuine, permanent, and not built on hostility, camoflage, preciosity. Rie art

of the monocled uncle is specious, not because it ends with pastels that are purified almost to abstractions, but because it is motivated by a reality blooded with the grossly Imperfect. For Stevens the grounds for art must not be egocentric, something as fragile as the desire of the poor uncle to escape. Bather they must answer as Stevens was to say in

"The Man with the Blue Guitar," "A generation's dream." Therefore, al­ though his own tastes inclined him to pastels, as he wrote again and again in his essays and implied throughout all of his poetry, Stevens came to realize that purity achieved only through tranquility at any price Implied an uninvolvement and Irresponsible detachment from the major concerns in life.

The tendency toward a specious, elegant, precious, dandified tran­ quility is, then, a negative Impulse expressed in "Le Monocle..," — one which, if continued, would produce more monocled uncles. For given those portraits, Stevens can never hope to establish art as the spiritual center of man's life. Art for the monocled uncle Is at once his means of survival, a pose, and a way of insulating himself from reality. Art, then, to he purified depends upon a heroic vision-- one that is provided neither by the mock-heroic poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," nor the narcissistic vision of the lady in "Sunday Morning," nor finally the comic-tragic, mock-heroic vision of the monocled uncle. It must, rather, come from a soul chastened by genuine suffering, unmitigated by any wish fulfillment or any other balm. In contrast to Crispin, the lady in "Sun­ day Morning," and the monocled uncle, ’lEhe Weeping Burgher" is indeed more in keeping with the spirit of the poems in Ideas of Order and those that i follow. In the poems discussed in the next chapter, then, ve follow the growth of Stevens* vision of art as the spirit thrust deep within the pressures of reality is disillusioned, torn to pieces, all but devasta­ ted. Nontheless, with its wild and frantic faith in the resources of the poetic imagination, it yearns for a beauty and nobility purified of everything degrading and impermanent. CHAPTER IV

CRISIS, DELUSION, DISINTEGRATION

Crisis

The very absence of characters like Crispin, the monocled uncle, and the lady In "Sunday Morning" In the poems in Ideas of Order Implies that Stevens has rejected both their visions and the aesthetic they Im­ ply: Crispin's stark reality; In Sunday Morning" the lady's narcissistic romanticism; and the detached, unblooded reality of the uncle. But the rejection of art, initiated by Stevens In Harmonium has Just begun. Re­ nunciation continues relentlessly from the poems In Ideas of Order to the very end of his career. Reason is constantly being summoned to curb the Imagination which too easily affirms its own romantic dreams, for reason as veil as the Imagination has its own notions of what it must have to be content. As Stevens vrote again and again, he is constantly trying to find what will satisfy both reason and the Imagination.

In the poems in Ideas of Order reason seems to be rejecting everything that the imagination has sought to believe in. In the meantime, the Ima­ gination, as though stricken by the impact of rejection, cries out in despair for something to hold on to. Merciless renunciation combined with desperate pleading, then, is the dominant tone of these poems. The emotions expressed in these poems are generated by a conflict of desires: the desire of the reason to renounce; the desire of the imagination to affirm something. In the first section of this chapter, I discuss the

152 153 kinds of renunciations vhlch oddur and the response of the Imagination to those renunciations. In the beautiful poem, "Idea of Order at Key

Vest" the imagination rises only temporarily above utter despair. After a brief discussion of the limited armistice between Imagination and rea- . son in "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery"— • where, the imagination having been stricken, the reason's need to assert Itself is relaxed— I discuss finally the implications of Stevens' present vision of the abso­ lute that the renunciations thus far carried out have achieved.

In "Farewell to Florida" (p. 117), the poet is saying goodbye to the south, the maternal warmth of Florida, for a monastic existence in the north. He sheds his skin (the body) upon the floor, and also casts away many old forms and beliefs which for him are no longer viable. His general conclusion is that the past must go; and, therefore, Brahms, and the divertimentl of Mozart, together with the gay waltz, must be renounced.

Sculpture, too, must go, but for somewhat different reasons; for in addi­ tion to their being part of the past, the lions of Sweden, in a poem of the same name, are monstrosities, as the poet tells Swenson, and the statue of General Jackson has only degraded Jackson and falsified reality.

In "Dance of the Macabre Mice," the statue is assaulted in the physical sense by the mice crawling over it. Christianity also is part of the dead past, as Stevens writes in "Botonist on Alp (No. 2)" (p. 135); the "cros­ ses on the convent roofs" must go, as well. For "what's above is in the past/ As sure as all the angels are." Turning finally to nature for so­ lace, Stevens finds that "Marx has ruined nature." V?k

These renunciations would he arrogant, to say the least, If they were carried on in a cold-blooded fashion* Nevertheless, Stevens believes that there is no use in postponing the admission that ours is an age of disbelief. While he himself feels that Verrocchio's noble rider is mag­ nificent, his own responses are not generally shared. It is he, then, who has decided to suffer renunciation willingly; for he knows that fall­ ing to share— to participate in— the tastes and beliefs of his times is tantamount to detaching himself, Just as much as the monocled uncle, from

"the pressures of reality." He is moved by the fright, hysteria and deso­ lation of the people suffering for want of anything noble to believe in.

Stevens' vision of despair resembles Eliot's grim vision in "The Hollow

Men:"

These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how, Imposing forms they cannot describe, Requiring order beyond their speech (C.P., p. 122).

He would prefer to believe in Brahms, Mozart, Verrocchio's statue. That is why when he bids goodbye to the past, his leavetaklng is reluctant, tragic, as "Farewell to Florida," "Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu," and

"Anglais Mort a Florence" demonstrate.

Having imagined the forms of the past now annihilated, he takes stock of what exists in the present. He finds only that "mountain-minded Hoon," perhaps, one is tempted to say, hillbilly music or a variety of it in the rock-and-roll of the present, and the "skreaking and scrittering residuum" which is the "Autumn Refrain.” Summer's unreal, beautifully melodious mu­ sic is new a thing of the past; and autumn, as always with Stevens, is the 155 veritable season. The spiritual condition of man conceived realistically, and not idealistically, is grim, almost hopeless. In the face of such despair, he appeals to a superior being but refuses most of the time to call that being God. In "Sailing after Lunch" (p. 120), the poet, in an old boat that "goes round on a crutch," appeals: "Hon Dieu, hear the poet's prayer." He is pleading for the romantic once again, even as he acknowledges that the romantic "must never remain." He desires a consum­ mation that is real, not illusory. And that is why, as he keeps insisting, the music of our times must be composed by "some harmonious sceptic."

Hew art for him is needed not merely to console the people who hy­ sterically cling to the artist as they would to a father for aid. More important, it is needed to corrode complacency. For Stevens everyone must realize himself, be authentic and live passionately according to his own commitments. Religions become outmoded at the very moment that those who profess to believe maintain their commitments in a very half­ hearted, hypocritical manner, as he writes in "Winter Bella" Art and re­ ligion must, above all, bring fulfillment, not mere complacency. It is fulfillment, then, that Stevens elevates as an end in itself in "Idea of

Order at Key West." In this poem Stevens affirms the only thing that at this moment he is capable of affirming: abstraction as a state of mind.

Abstraction comes to be the only state he continues to affirm to the end of his life. For he is never able to discover the sensuous forms that suffice to express his belief in absolute perfection and purity. Once he has written "Esthetlque du Mai" his hope for discovering those forms is seriously qualified. From that time to the end of his life, his main 10 in each piece. An essay hy a philosopher projects a concisely formu­ lated principle that he supposedly does not intend to qualify at a later stage of his career. What concerns us in the work of a scholar is what he has to tell us and not the development of his thought.

With an artist, however, our interest is quite different. For we are concerned "both with the content of his thought and its style.

Stevens, in fact, asks to be considered in this way. One of the most important subjects of his poems and essays is the mind in the act of discovering itself, that is, its characteristic style. His essays, therefore, I suggest, may be read as both criticism and a kind of poetry.

Indeed, in the introduction to The Necessary Angel, Stevens writes that his essays are not intended to be conventional pieces of literary criti­ cism, to be "one more Ars Poetica having to do, say, with the techniques of poetry and perhaps with its history." He asks that one not confuse his essays with "pages of criticism nor of philosophy....They are pages that have to do with one of the enlargements of life." Ambitiously and ob­ scurely described as "one of the enlargements of life," his concern here is spiritual and, so he says, one makes "spiritual commitments" because one feels driven to make them, and not solely for the purpose of under­ standing. The faculties brought to bear, therefore, are not those in­ volved in assimilating and judging facts. For to speak of spiritual survival requires an act of will, of desire which, for Stevens, is in­ deed the crucial manifestation of the imagination.

I propose, then, to discuss the essays in The Necessary Angel and the Opus Posthumous in a number of ways. I see each essay as providing 156 purpose is to Imagine the mind in a state of being perfected, abstract.

In "Idea of Order at Key Vest" (p. 128), the being vho achieves the greatest fulfillment and brings fulfillment to everyone else is the poet conceived now miraculously striding the water (walking over the wa­ ter, as the lady in "Sunday Morning" imagined that she, as well as Christ, could do) and singing her chant that aspires both heavenward and back once again to the earth which it transfigures. The sea itself is "gen­ ius." But she, the poet, is even greater than the sea, for "She sang

'beyond the genius of the sea." No matter how much in "its mimic motion," the sea tries to imitate her song, it never forms a sound like a "voice," nor speaks to the mind. Not a spirit, the sea is "Like a body wholly body," yet fluttering sleeves that are "empty," as though the spirit had slipped out of them. Incessantly, the ocean "made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,” as though pleading to be part of a higher order. But it is what it is: an "ever-hooded, traglc-gestured sea,” heroically aspiring toward something greater than itself, but unable to transcend

Itself and thereby achieve fulfillment Its cry is "Inhuman," of the veritable ocean, and nothing else.

It is the "Inhuman," therefore, that is imperfect; fulfillment is possible solely for the genius of poetry. This view, where the human is superior, more powerful than the Inhuman, expresses the apollonlan vi­ sion of man idealized and celebrated. In Stevens* later poems, humanity is to be identified with an unhuman absolute; but that final belief of his is, as we shall observe in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” at best half-hearted. To the very end of his career, it was man idealized that 157 was elevated by Stevens, even as he aspired beyond that viev to the ulti­ mate vision of man completely dehumanized.

In the following stanza of "Idea of Order..," Stevens does not vish to disparage the sea, making it seem far Inferior to the genius of poetry.

"The sea was not a mask;" neither, he writes, was she. Though song and water might therefore resemble each other in certain respects, far from being Identical, they cannot even fuse into a harmonious whole; they can­ not be "interchanged"-- no, not even "if what she sang was what she heard."

Indeed, "It may be that in all her phrases stirred/ The grinding water."

But, even then, as the poet emphasizes again and again: "it was she and not the sea we heard." It is her song, music, she— all three interchange­ able, since she never had a self (she herself being an abstraction) "ex­ cept the one she sang and, singing, made." It is that "self" he wishes to "abstract" from the droning of "grinding water and...gasping wind.'1!

In the next stanza, he clarifies the differences between them, placing the sea now on a much lower level of reality than her. "For she was the maker of the song she sang./ The ever-hooded, traglc-gestured sea/ Was merely a place by which she walked to sing" (italics mine). Who is this being, we ask. We want to know, we have to know, for "It was the spirit" that we seek.

It would not occur to us to ask this question, he implies, if the sound we heard was "only the dark voice of the sea," or "the outer voice of sky/ And cloud." No matter how clearly heard or where that sound might be, it "would have been deep air," the rhythmic, repetitious, monotonous

"speech of air," "Repeated...without end." Even if, in themselves, these 158 are heroic cries, her voice "was more than that,” more, in fact, even

"than her voice and ours” as veil. It vas a song vlth a beginning and an end which had the pover to transfix us long after ve ceased to hear it. How, then, does it move us? What can ve see (knov) after ve have listened to this elevating chant? It is not the "Theatrical distances, bronze shadovs heaped/ On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres/ Of sky and sea." All of these things, imposing themselves in bold relief, ve can see vithout her aid.

Her voice captures all the mysteries unseen by us: "The sky acutest at its vanishing,” the solitude of the sky "measured to the hour." Whereas mountain and ocean present themselves only as mass, she conjures the distances among them and every nuance of color in the horizon and vithin the sea. One recalls in this connection the first lines from "Farewell to Florida" that strongly suggest Turner's paint­ ing of Venice: "Key West sank downward under massive clouds/ And sil­ vers and greens spread over the sea." In Turner's Venice, it seems that the fantastically variegated palaces and churches had finally sunk and that all of their colors have drained off, to float on the surface of the vater. The singer in "The Idea of Order at Key West* is a genius in celebrating those colors at the point where they seen to pale to illu­ sions.

Having defined her achievements, Stevens now begins to celebrate the genius of poetry, naming her in extravagant praise:

•••the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea Whatever self it had, became the self That vas her song, for she vas the maker. 159

We see her, thereupon, not as a part of the ocean, nor as the paltry nude on a weed, nor even Botticelli's delicate Venus, supported and protected by a shell that some higher pover provides. Instead, "ve beheld her striding there alone." Finally he writes:

..•there never vas a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

In his ecstatic praise, he yields himself to believing in that transcen­ dental vorld of which she alone is maker.

Though, in the final two stanzas, her song is no longer to be heard, its pover to transform has already taken effect. Stevens now experiences a fulfillment, sustained, Intense, and calming. He asks Ramon Fernandez to answer a question that he himself could just as well provide. He asks it, one assumes, because his fulfillment vill be yet more Intense, if he can hear someone besides himself celebrating the song. But before he hears the answer— which, in this dramatic monologue, is outside the limits of the poem— lovingly, in ecstatic praise of the song which has fulfilled his "Blessed rage for order," he draws out the question which seems to resolve into an answer: when "the singing ended and we turned/

Toward the town," "the glassy lights...in the fishing boats at anchor there.tilting at many angles, "Mastered the night, and portioned out the sea./ Fixing,...arranging, deepening, enchanting night." !Rie genius of poetry, elevating the spirit, enables it to see the lights in the harbour as expressing some meaning beyond themselves; they have be­ come symbols of order and harmony, which transcend the song .Itself, ex­ tending to the universe of ocean, sky, and song. The song has "enchanted” the night, leaving it now,when song Itself has died out, "enchanting." 160

But the chief value of the chant is not solely that It has established

the relationship between man and nature; It has moreover transported man

far beyond nature toward an Intimation of the final resting place of all

thought: beyond tragrant portals dimly starred,” to a knowledge "of our­

selves and of our origins." This Is, of course, the end of the monocled

uncle's Journey to the sublime. The idealization of the human chant—

not the human form as In "Peter Quince”— implies already In "Idea of

Order at Key West” that Stevens Is envisioning the ascent to heaven as a

gradually disembodying experience. In "Ideas of Order.*.” the spirit which transcend^ the sensuous world achieves fulfillment expressed as

rapture. The beings in paradise in Stevens' later poems are utterly dis­ passionate in their fulfillment. While the body is blotted out in "Idea of Order.*," the soul remains very much intact, as that aspect of human­

ity which is affirmed, sustained, and extravagantly idealized.

But as Stevens was so painfully aware, ecstatic feelings cannot be sustained for long in their fullest intensity, even if the illusion of . ecstasy can be sustained in art. And, therefore, after the fulfillment that occurs in "Idea of Order.*," there follows a sense of fatigue and depletion in "Like Decoration in a Nigger Cemetery" (p. 150). The poet

in this poem, like many of the failures in "Esthetique du Mai," draws back from life, casting away the burden of his identity. He enjoins nature to

"sigh, sleep, shout" for him, for he is unable either to weep, to rest,

or to celebrate. But nature cannot sing its own songs, for, as he knows in "Idea of Order.*," it requires the poetic genius to sing its praises.

Unable, then, to sustain a continuous chant, the poet makes a series of feeble attempts to stir himself to life. The figure of Walt Whitman strides into the first stanza, a sad reminder of vital affirmation that The poet himself ie unable to feel. Be asks Whitman to he his double, identifying him with the sun. But Whitman vanishes as does Stevens' mo­ mentary resurgence of strength, giving vay not to the beauty and warmth of the earth, but rather to late fall, frost, snow, chill, death and no­ thingness. In this poem, then, death is not the mother of beauty, as it vas for the lady in "Sunday Morning" and for Whitman in "When Lilacs

Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Life, beauty, hope, the sense of the i future-- all flicker dimly. The Poet retreats from too much activity, from tirlngly rich colors and sensuous details, from summer and the south. Every image evokes an image of death.

In "Like Decorations..," given Stevens' exhaustion, the only ful­ fillment he can achieve is a kind tranquility that often follows a state of intense activity. It is not the vay in which he imagines himself in his later poems. There, with passionate commitment never esqpressed in

Harmonium and Ideas of Order, he strives to fight for what he desires.

He hopes to achieve tranquility heroically and not through retreat. In

"Like Decorations..," he believes that the tphere of my fortune" is not solids and colors but rather that level of reality between "the mat of frost" and "the mat of clouds." This condition of disembodiment comes in the later poems not because Stevens cannot tolerate the body and de­ sires a means of escape from it. Bather, in his later poems, though he clings to the body (form, life), he renounces it reluctantly, heroically, as the only vay of achieving abstraction. Finally, he attempts to provide the art he claims our age is wanting in: "Shall I grapple with my des- troyers/ In the muscular poses of the museums?/ But my destroyers a- vold the museums". 162

Fulfillment in tranquility heroically achieved, abstraction, and art: these, then, are the goals that cone to mean more to him than any­ thing else. But how are they to be attained? In a state of lassitude and spurious tranquility, as though he were wisely expecting that chance event vould disclose the means Itself, the monster emerges out of nowhere, the imagination, suddenly infuriated, comes to its own defense. In "The

Man with the Blue Guitar," the chief antagonists in Harmonium and Ideas of Order, reason and the imagination, gravity and grace, come to be imaged in the monster and the angelic imagination. The possible reconcDr latlon of those two forces— without which the mind cannot achieve repose— seems in that long poem more remote than ever.

Delusion

Modern reality, Stevens wrote, is a reality of decreation. The weep­ ing burgher In an early poem by the same name is not altogether responsi­ ble for it. For such images as we have in the art of today would never have been expressed had they not existed in dome form in reality. The artist exaggerates the destruction and ugliness in reality. He conjures an image of the universe dislocated, unstructured, where each thing and person fall to pieces in a "horde of destructions," unleashing violence and chaos. The "parts of a world," magnified to garguantuan sizes, aspire toward some superior being for help, unable to see, as Stevens maintains, that the only way to the absolute is by means of an intercessor.

Searching for order and meaning, the man "that is falling,” the artist who would be that intercessor, lies awake at night staring as though hypnotized by the "pillow that is black/ In the catastrophic room1' (p. 187). Though he is "beyond despair," part of him that is still alive, "Like an lntenser instinct," waits for the face of his angelic double to be revealed on the pillow. At last he seeB a head, "bodiless.../

Thick-lipped from riot and rebellious cries," from whose bldody lips sound "immaculate syllables," as music sung "only by doing what he did." fhlla hla vision illumines the earth with nobility and hope, the darkest moments of his life are eloquently expressed in this grotesque disfigure­ ment. The bloody head on the pillow, this divine monster, is the artist.

Stevens commemorates his journey toward artistic integrity in one of his finest achievements, "The Man with the Blue Guitar"(p. 168). The angelic imagination makes the odyssey to hell as the only means of perfecting itself by attempting to resolve the antagonists of reason and imagination.

For it knows that to be believable and thereby serve as the spiritual cen­ ter of the world, art must harmonize evil with good to achieve an inclu­ sive vision.

Yet, as Stevens knows, such harmony is difficult to achieve. For in the very search for it; the artist is maddened into a magician; "a shears- man of sorts," he is cutting up the world Instead of unifying it. Although he wishes to conceive of the world in his own way, he is ceaselessly re­ minded that he is not playing "things as they are." He tries to tell peo­ ple that art and reality are two different things; but they insist that art be made identical to reality. Therefore, he becomes another weeping burgher, "tortured for old speech." Try as much as he can^he cannot play things as they are. Reality ewes once again to suffer distortion at the mercy of the Imagination. But Instead of helng momentarily trans­ figured into the ideal as it vas in "The Weeping Burgher," reality is grotesquely deformed. The artist simply cannot play things as they are.

By virtue of his helng an artist, he Is driven by a "suasion not to be denied ." Descending and ascending at the same time, adhering to reality and transcending it, he would strive to balance the temporal and the e- ternal and resolve good and evil. But the people demand that he concern himself only vith the temporal, and with what they, and not he, desire.

His aspiration for nobility frustrated from the beginning, he is not content merely to adhere to reality. Taking a sweet revenge upon his audience, he must plunge far below reality to conjure up the nightmare images that are evoked whan an artist striving for the sublime is forced by his public to surrender to the mundane.

He knows from the beginning that his vision has gone "askew.” For he admits that he "cannot bring a world quite round." His creation is a kind of crazy-quilt of phantasmogorical shapes frozen into nightmare postures. With a weird malice he tells his audience that he cannot man­ age to play things as they are, but that he will try to do his best. I» deed, he makes a supreme effort to please his audience; in what is per­ haps the most grotesque image in all of Stevens1 poetry, the third part of "The Han with the Blue Guitar" discloses what happens to the soul of an artist and to his vision, when he is forced to be a puppet manipulated by a mediocre and ignoble audience. Ah, but to play man number one, To drive the dagger In bis heart,

To lay his brain upon the board And pick the acrid colors out,

To nail his thought across the door, Its vings spread vide to rain and snow,

To strike his living hi and ho, To tick it, tock it, turn it true,

To bang it from a savage blue, Jangling the metal of the strings...

As a final irony, he imagines himself desiring to achieve a vision that he despises. First man is to be killed, and then studied like a speci­ men in a laboratory; art, then is to become autopsy. Nuances of color are to be perceived by picking the brain apart, and analogies established by nailing man's "thought across the door,/ Its wings spread vide,” mer­ cilessly exposed to the elements. Man is to be celebrated in a grotesque and protracted crucifixion, the nerves, like vires, nailed "across the door." His agony is to be sustained by the poet jangling and banging the strings of his guitar, the nerves in the brain. Poet turned madman by means of his crime, Implicitly Impugns his persecutors, the public, even as he executes their order to play things as they are. "So that's life then," he sings to the accompaniment of the guitar. He elevates his own vision grotesquely: "A million people on one string," everyone of than dehumanized, shorn of all value, all identity.

The artist knows that above all things he desires "the greatness of poetry." For him nobility is expressed in nuances of experiences and colors and in a nev hymn that will rise to empty heaven. He desires yet more: in part VI a state of purity, real and not Illusory; in part VII, the sensuous world created as "shadows" in our sun, which give comfort definitions of reality and the imagination; at the same time I see

those definitions of reality and imagination in the early essays as

disclosing vague intimations of definitions of Stevens' spiritual i : commitments that are more clearly articulated and defined finally in

his essays in the Opus Posthumous. The essays, then, I see both as

being self-contained and at the same time as constituting parts of an

evolving whole. Furthermore, in making a few comments on the structure

and style of the essays, I shall indicate in what respects Stevens'

essays require to be read as poems. In the very delivery of these

pieces, Stevens reveals the following idiosyncrasies: a deliberate

understatement, a failure of exhaustive elaboration of a single defini­

tion; a refusal to restrict himself to a single subject; a predilection

for digression— all of them ways, once he has initiated a systematic

inquiry, of taking away at one point, without warning, the system, order,

and clarification that he had previously led us to expect. It is as

though, having in his own mind thought through an idea carefully, he be­

gan, before writing it down, to conceive of how the idea came to be, to

reconstruct process in the very exposition of its product. It is not as

though he were covering up some of his tracks to confuse the reader. In-

deed, a more rigid presentation would misrepresent the accidents of

thought. His purpose is to arrive at a system, and therefore any imita­

tion of the process of thought that renders the system immediately a- valiable to our understanding is, in its quality of seeming to be ready­ made, illusory. To understand Stevens' ideas and concurrently account for the deliberate obscurity in which they are cast, therefore, discloses 166 and pleasure. Ideally the sun would "share our works," be "The immacu­

late, the merciful good." But even as he desires all this, the "strings are cold on the blue guitar."

All of his aspirations are unrealized when he is forced to play only the tunes that people dictate. Without his imagination, the colors and perceptions of the world are reduced to a series of blunt opposites, of

stark extremes of day and night. The sun becomes a staring monster. In part VIII, without the imagination of the poet, reason which tries to play things as they are, "brings the storm to bear." Finally the artist is asked to surrender to the tastes of the mob and become the "pagan in a varnished car" celebrated by a peanut people in a tinny parade of vut gar sounds and empty souls.

But he refuses to be degraded in this way. And so with • sudden assertion of strength and desire, the poet cries out against the hero of popular culture: "'Here am I, my adversary, that/ Confront you, hoo-ing the slick trombones." In that cry he topples over the cardboard hero, looking now with "a petty misery" upon the mob turned into "Lifeless ab­ stractions" without their conquering hero. And then he realizes that even if it is vulgar, art cannot be dispensed with; for without it, every­ one is deadened. "Woman become/ The cities, children become the fields./

And men in waves become the sea." If this metamorphosis is the conse­ quence of his rejection of popular art, of playing things as they are, then he thinks that he must become a hack writer and play "tom-tom" on the guitar. But he still cannot force himself to something that he is con­ stitutionally unable to do: to reduce himself. Lying awake at night he wonders: 167

Where Do I begin and end? And where As I strum the thing, do I pick up That which momentously declares Itself not to be I and yet Must be. It could be nothing else (p. 171) *

He does not knov where to begin to patch his sense of the world, the ideal, with their sense of the world, the real. Now he wants above all to discover the thing "that which momentously delcares/ Itself not to be I." What is it? Is it the vision of heaven? This is what he would like to think it is, and in the following stanza he searches for a heavenly vision, one which is initially arabesque and twisted, but finally refined and ordered so that the "blue sleek with a hundred chins" settles into a single glistening in the night. This is that

"something other" he would crave to affirm, "things as they are,/ In a chiaroscuro," something other, then, as angel.

But to his horror, looking at Picasso"s Harlequin painting, he is confounded as he realizes that the something other is nothing less than a monster, a "hoard of destructions." He registers incredulity before that picture. Has Picasso's synthesis of reality and imagination issued only in the vision of the artist as "naked egg?" This, then, is the mo­ ment of the most Intense agony in the poem; the poet knows that if he believes in this picture, then he must conceive of himself as being the egg in that picture and the dead man seated at the table. In what is per­ haps the climax In this poem he decides emphatically that he cannot be­ lieve in such evil, hate, and destruction, that he cannot sanction it, : and tells those who Vare bitter at heart" that they are free, if they wish, to "place honey on the altars" of such art "and die." As for him­ self, he has decided to remain alive. 168

He tries to insist that the form (the body) that man has, as veil

as the forms that art takes, are not of the monster, "an animal," vhose

%lavs propound...." Declaring that he is unalterably committed to a vision

of life that is life-giving and enobllng, in the most moving section of

the poem (part XXX), he vovs or prays: "That I may reduce the monster

to/ Myself." He does not desire to destroy the monster; for then he he vould be alone and/cannot exist alone, detached from reality. Therefore,

he tries to decide precisely hov much of himself he will permit to be

reduced. Agonizing lest his art be too egocentric, too much as he vould

desire it, he achieves an armistice betveen the monster and himself— but

at such an enormous cost to himself, that he is virtually destroyed.

This, then, is his vision of art, reiterated throughout in "The

Man vlth the Blue Guitar" in thoughts and songs (theory and poetry) that

come unprogrammed, disjointed, as though from the traumas of the climax

of the poem, until, in the final part, glancing backward in a last assess­

ment, he vrites tragically: "That generation:?* dream, aviled/ In the mud." In "time to come," there vlll be "a wrangling of two dreams," an

open warfare betveen the poetic and the anti-poetic. If they ever sign a truce, the monster may be civilized and the hero may surrender his no­ ble form to vear the tragic robe of reality. Art may, then, project an

image that is "below the level of reality" and at the same time not violent— as, for Instance, in part XXV, where a man is holding "The vorld

upon his nose," and playing it "this-a-vay," "that-a-vay," "this-a-way/1

or instead of the monsters who rip at the strings of the blue guitar, as

Stevens vrites in Adagla, clams may one day play accordlans. Or perhaps 169 we shall come to regulate our lives so that ve dream out our nightmares

"on stone beds,11 and "forget by day" everything save pleasing Images of

"The Imagined pine, the Imagined Jay."

The artist can never be content with such a resolution as the one proposed at the end of "The Man vlth the Blue Guitar"; for It Is as cryptic as the riddling endings of "The Comedian.and "Esthetlque du Mai." What resolution, then, between reality and the Imagination, be­ tween the monster and the angel does this poem lead one to anticipate?

Stevens knew that he had to resolve reality and the Imagination. For him that task is tantamount to a struggle between man and those forces that destroy civilization. The stumbling block for the artist is that he must strive for an armistice; he dare not slaughter the monster, lest he lose contact with reality. Be comparison, Saint George had an easy way out; for once the dragon was killed, the world was serene and peace­ ful. But the man with the blue guitar realizes that there never will be a happy ending. His only recourse Is to come to terms with i&allty. His willingness to achieve an armistice with reality ( and not unconditional surrender) is so great that he all but transforms himself into a monster.

And In the process, rather than overpowering the monster, he himself is destroyed, destroys himself at the moment that he is driven to thrust a dagger into his own heart, to pick his brain to pieces and to nail It to a threshold, there to remain on exhibition for his audience. He may claim that he surmounts the malice revealed in the beginning of the poem the moment he rejects the monster in Picasso's harlequin painting. But he is trapped once again by his own decision to take the monster as his 170

"something other." Instead of civilizing the monster, he is turned Into a barbarian and is destined to mutilate himself. As we read this poem again and again, the conclusions lead inexorably to the first grotesque

Image In the poem.

As far as the poem stands, Its grim message is that ve learn nothing.

Riere is no message, no moral truth In it, but rather a grotesque evasion in the riddling prophecy at the conclusion. There is, furthermore, no determined progression of ideas and themeB, since the state of mind of the poet is anything but tranquil, composed, and confident. At times, a thought is raised and left unfinished, partial, pitifully incomplete.

At times, madly unaware of the destruction unleashed, the mind whirls gaily through the wreckage, plucking the strings of the guitar, singing

"ay di ml." Still, at other times, as at the beginning, the tone is de­ ceptively simple. But shortly afterward a desperate cry terrifies: "Ah, but to play man number one." At times, it is a tone that projects anger and hopelessness: "Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry;" at others, a tone brassy and cheap: "Raise the reddest columns..."; at still others, a cool meditation: "Poetry is the subject of the poem,/ From this the poem issues and to this returns." Though seme connection among all the parts can be established, it is impossible at any one point to predict what will come next: whether it will be a swarm of "creeping men,/ Mechanical beetles," or "light, the relic of farewells, Rock of valedictory echoings," or "Blue sleek with a hundred chins.”

As much as we try to account for all the details, there is no order which will explain most of them. The only rationale is one that merely notes that everything indiscriminately must be included. 171

All thirty-three parts of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" are vi­ gnettes, thirty-three variations on the same theme: the desire of the artist to Include all Images of good and evil even if he has no Idea of how they may he understood and related. In the end, no harmony be­ tween them is possible at all. Hie only conceivable mode is warfare: the profile of the angel facing the profile of the beast. And so, as though he had painted a huge mural, Stevens has piled up one image upon another in "The Man...," showing episodes of the cosmic struggle above and below the level of reality. One image is superimposed upon the other, as if in a cubist painting, where every angle of perception, carved by a knife,is sharply delineated. Stark, impenetrable, frozen: these are a "horde of destructions" for our safe-keeping until one night we lie awake staring into the dark and see on our pillow a bloody head that makes nightmare come to life.

Like Stevens, we wonder whether being inclusive is worth such enormous sacrifices. Hie desire to pay the price at least once is a noble, a courageous undertaking for any artist. Can we blame a man, however, if he refuses to make the same sacrifice again and again? He know, of course, that Stevens wrote the poem "The Man with the Blue

Guitar" only once in his life. Unlike Picasso, whose cubist and class­ ical paintings were being created at the same time, Stevens was incap­ able of descending and ascending again and again. He knew that his subject was the ascent to paradise, and he refused to wrangle inter­ minably with the beast.

The poems in Parts of a World, therefore, show the world as it appears to a man who has renounced order for the second time: first, 172 the art of the past; second, the art of the present. The man with the blue guitar destroyed himself in trying to achieve a resolution of good and evil, because, for Stevens, order cannot be achieved by yoking these tvo antagonists. Yet to Ignore evil altogether and establish analogies betveen things unimpeachably divine signals a failure of spir­ it and a retreat from life. It signals, too, an impasse beyond vhich one is unable to evolve, and an eventual regression to a facile belief that the vorld is unequivocally benevolent and good. Stevens' strong­ est instincts drove him onvard tovard new syntheses of reality and im­ agination. But unlike the man with the blue guitar, Stevens resolved in Parts of a World to purify evil of all of its destructive potential­ ities, so that it could finally be affirmed as a powerful good. And in that way he foresaw the possibility of establishing art as an interces­ sor between man and the absolute, the single embodiment of the poet's vision of absolute perfection conceived on earth and thrust deep within a mundane, commonplace reality.

Disintegration

When Stevens emerges from the contest with the monBter in "The

Man..." to see the world for a second time in a state of disintegration, he seems strengthened, rather than devastated, by his experiences. In

Parts of a World he expresses his Irrevocable decision to survive and triumph over the forces of destruction. Indeed, he indicates that the breakdown of order in the world is to be initiated by him as a means of 173

achieving a new affirmation and synthesis. Such a disintegration marks

the end of one era and stirs the imagination to sudden life:

It is one of the peculiarities of the imagination that it is always at the end of an era. What happens is that it is always attaching itself to a new reality, and ad­ hering to it. It is not that there is a new imagination hut that there is a new reality (N.A., p. 22).

The perception of chaos and loss is a tragic one; the spirit depressed hy the destruction everywhere about it experiences a purifying change.

With fierce idealism, the Imagination longs to assert Itself as the

single harmonizing force left in the world.

Awakening from his nightmare of destruction in "The Man..•," the poet decides emphatically that the "Clear water in a brilliant bowl"

simply will no longer suffice to satisfy the mind's desire for a vi­

sion of life that will reconcile good and evil. At no previous time had Stevens believed more firmly in the moral power of the imagination

than he does in Parts of a World. As though to commemoratethls new en­

largement of the imagination which has evolved from wish-fulfillment, he writes in "Asides on the Oboe" (p. 256), that everything written before Parts of a World has prepared him to write opus number one.

Although the declaration to action is made, to create art that Is both realistic and pure, he cannot offer an indication of what this new art is to be. Instead, the poems in Parts of a World disclose the mind fortuitously attempting to discover its subject. The group of poems I first discuss record Stevens engaged once again in renunciation. This time, however, it is that peculiar cast of mind that he condemns: thatv of the theoretician who coldly, dispassionately attempts to understand the absolute. The theoretician has totally alienated (abstracted) him­

self from human experience, the sensuous world, from, In a word, reality.

His arid calm is violently disturbed In the poems I next discuss by the

poetic act of decreation, Stevens' counterpart for the event of war.

For it is the imagination in time of war that subtllzes simplistic

definitions and banal and stark contrasts so that realities beneath

realities may be discovered.

Stevens calls these new, pure realities "abstractions." But the

discovery of abstraction does not resolve the disparity between the

real and the ideal; rather , Stevens now finds them more irreconcila­

ble than ever before. In the last two very great poems I discuss at

the end of this chapter, "Extracts from the Addresses To the Academy

of Fine Ideas" and "Examination of a Hero in Time of War," Stevens

strives to understand the price one must pay in committing himself to

either one without the other— to either reality without imagination,

or imagination without reality: the temporal without the eternal, mon­

ster without angel, earth without heaven, or, conversely, the eternal

without the temporal, and so on. Because a commitment to an either-or

view of life seems intolerable to Stevens, he strives in "Notes Toward

a Supreme Fiction” to achieve for the very last time a resolution, a

synthesis, between earth and heaven.

The Neutral Center. In "The Common Life" (p. 221) Stevens projects

an image of art in singularly dehumanized and abstract terms, the cold­

est and most arid image of art that Stevens has condemned in all of his poetry. 175

A black line beside a white line; And the stack of the electric plant, A black line drawn on flat air.

It is a morbid light In which they stand, Like an electric lamp On a page of Euclid.

In this light a man is a result, A demonstration, and a woman, Without rose and without violet The shadows that are absent from Euclid, Is not a woman for a man.

The paper is whiter For these black lines. It glares beneath the webs Of wire, the designs of ink The planes that ought to have genius, The columns like marble ruins, Outlined and having alphabetical Notations and footnotes. The paper is whiter. Hie men have no shadows And the women have only one side.

The figures on the frieze reduce life to the barest colors of black and white. They altogether lack dimension, substance, and motion; reductlonlsm and devitalization, therefore, is the price one pays for fixity and definition. As Stevens maintains in "Add This to Rhetoric"

(p. 198), whatever "is posed," is fixed, and therefore automatically destroyed. In Harmonium art is rejected when it is either too narcis­ sistic or too detached; In Ideas of Order when it exists as part of the past which no longer sustains belief in the present; in"The Man with the

Blue Guitar" when it conjures a monstrous vision of life. But in Parts of a World art is rejected for new reasons. Stevens is terrified lest art destroy rather them create, fix rather than sustain motion. Fur­ thermore, as I observe in "Examination of a Hero in Time of War," he 12

interplay of personality and thought that resides at the core of his poetry.

I begin this study, then, with Stevens’ essays which, I believe, present with more clarity than the poems themselves his attempt to ex­ plain what he takes to be his responsibility to his public and what he

takes to be the role of art in his culture. As I consider these essays

in fairly chronological order, I observe his interests broadening as be moves from the problem of the poet, to society, to history, and finally to a theory of being.

Definition, Austerity, and Death

The characteristic one often observes in Stevens' prose work is that it is extremely difficult to follow. One is tempted to say of

Stevens that he is a poor essayist, until one realizes that the discon­ tinuity of his prose and its vagueness have been deliberately calcula­ ted. Commenting upon a dense and obscure passage in "Imagination as

Value," Kermode remarks:

When the lecture "Imagination as Value" first appeared in print, I myself knowing little of Stevens, wrote somewhat derisively of the lecture as belonging to what was appar­ ently a "new American genre" and marvelled at the ability of an audience to be still understanding the lecture "at that point where one's aunt in California transmits that pregnant communication about her geraniums." I know now not only that this is the work of the highest calibre, but also that I was wrong in supposing that anybody followed it at first hearing.

Writing of impressions that have since been revised, Kermode notes that

1 Frank Kermode, Wallace Stevens (Edinburgh, i960), p. 18. 176

finds that art contaminates the purest realities, the abstractions,

the absolute*

His main concern in Barts of a World is to discover vhat aspirations

and achievements the mind can Justifiably hope to have and vhen, further­

more, its ambitions have simply been too extravagant to issue in any be­

lievable achievement. His main object of criticism in the poems in

Barts of a World are the automata, in which class he includes all with­

ered philosophers, saints, and theologians: respectively, the "nabob

of bones" in "landscape with Boat" (p. 2^1), Saint Thomas in "Les Blus

Belles Bages" (p. 2M0, and Cotton Mather in "The Blue Buildings in the

Summer Air" (p. 2l6). In these poems Stevens denies that one can com­

mune directly with the absolute; he insists that those who make such

claims relate to something unreal, Illusory, hallucinated. For to deny

the physical world for Stevens is tantamount to saying that one is con­

tained within oneself; and, as Stevens maintained constantly, unless one

Establishes a relationship with "something other," he will become utter­

ly dehumanized. This thought is eloquently expressed In "Extracts From

the Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas." But for all his fear of

dehumanization that results from an attempt to commune directly with

the absolute, in Transport to Summer and Ihe Bock direct communion be­

comes Stevens' goal.

In Barts of a World he condemns the "nabob of bones" who indiffer­

ently, nonchalantly brushes aside everything in the universe to arrive at the "neutral center." In his dispassion, he gives the air of so­ phistication and condescension. Stevens reveals his Irritation with the theoretician whose quality of mind is frigid, myopic, and megaloman­

iacs!. While, as observed, it was Stevens* desire to give some form and

order to the instinct of nobility, to resolve the chaotic antagonisms

he experienced in "The Man With the Blue Guitar," now he has come to

see order as a potentially powerful evil. For he believes that in the

desire to establish order, one often Insists upon reducing parts of the

world to a single substance, idea, order. That is why ideal order is

for him a state of mind: of deep feeling, tranquility, achievement, and

modesty. It is, I suggest, the possible automaton that Stevens recog­

nizes in himself, in life, and art that he strenously attempts to deny.

We see him striving selfconsciously to attach himself with gusto to

something apart from himself, to break down "self-contained logic" and

any forms that might imply a conquest and destruction by the mind of

life and motion. "Study of the Two Pears" (p. 196), is a singularly

dispassionate description. These pears, Stevens writes several times,

"resemble nothing else." Obey exist distinct from the mind, as things apart, as something other. But, he responds to them without wonder,

curiosity, pleasure— as though they had been reduced to mind. His re­

sponse to "A Dish of Peaches in Russia" (p. 12k), is altogether dif­ ferent. His feeling for the peaches seems, Indeed, to be in excess.

He wonders at times whether only "...the Ignorant man.../ Has any chance to mate his life with life/ That is the sensual pearly spouse," or whe­ ther harmony and life can be achieved only through .being, not mere­ ly knowing." His distrust of the intellect is explicit in "Extracts..," and "Esthetique duMal." In these poems, as well as in those that fol­ 178

low them in Angoras of Autumn and The Rock, Stevens conceives of the angelic imagination chastened, existing without intellect as pure helng.

Yet Stevens feels strongly that humor can prevent the thinker from excessive self-esteem and meditation from an excessive austerity that

is withering to all who engage in it. In the first stanza of "Connois­ seur of Chaos" (p. 215), the theses are spelled out as if they were philosophical postulations, the first marked "A", the second,"B”. But as he elaborates on each one, the jaunty sing-song manner, with the last few words of occasional phrases suggesting the refrain of some gay sailing song, makes the whole exercise seem immensely enjoyable.

If all the green of spring was blue, and it is* If all the flowers of South Africa were bright On the tables of Connecticut, and they are; If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do; And if all went on in an orderly way And it does; a law of Inherent opposites, Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port, As pleasant as the brush strokes of a bough, An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.

He writes that "We cannot go back" to the belief that "these opposite things partake of one." Neither is he willing to believe that there is no order in the world. He begins once again to formulate a thesis with an air of definition, but with a jocular change of mood, he adds sudden­ ly: "This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more/ Element in the immense disorder of truths.” Commenting finally upon the letters

"A" and '.'B" which prepare one to receive an idea, fixed, formulated, and formidable, he asks us not to receive A and B like statuary, posed/ For a vista in the Louvre," but to see them as they are, "things chalked/

On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see." Though "A" and "B" 179 may be permitted to exist Intact as abstractions, to remain strong and alive, they must be thrust deep Into the familiar, the real vorld.

In the poem "The Glass of Water" (p. 197)i Stevens shows the concept taking on new life, once it is thrust into reality. He begins somewhat aridly, detached:

That the glass should melt in the heat, That the water would freeze in cold, Shows that this object is merely a state One of many, between two poles. So, In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

The form is hypothesis, demonstration, and conclusion: self-contained logic. He also reduces one object to something else: "Show that this object is merely a state" (my italics). But in a half-playful and half- serious manner, he seizes the particular to enable him to understand the principle. The glass is made to stand for the center, the light becomes a lion who comes to the glass, as though it were coming to a pool to drink. Everything abstract takes on new life in being embodied in a particular. While "the refractions,/ Hie metaphysics, the plastic parts of poems/ Crash in the mind" of the poet, the "nabob of bones" now "fat Joeundue" worries "About what stands here in the center, not the glass,/ But in the center of our lives...."

Poetry itself, as Stevens knows, is no guarantee of passion, vi­ tality, and life. For in "Poem Written at Morning" (p. 129), he writes that there are some metaphors which are almost as dehumanizing as the dryest excursions into theory. When "men of ice" paint, and not of the

"senses,V then the ripe and tempting particulars of life are abstracted from reality and made cold and forbidding. In Parts of a World, there- 180

fore, he strongly affirms passionate Involvement with "something other."

He moves away from "cold porcelain, low and round,/ With nothing more

than the carnations there" and endorses the activity of poetic decrea­

tion which blasts the "romantic tenements of rose and Ice." But ironi­

cally enough, Stevens comes to discover In the process of decreation a

pure reality (an abstraction) which in many of his final poems entails

a rejection of life as well as art. Indeed the grandeur of Stevens1

final poems comes in the tragic antagonism that has riddled him through­

out all of his career: between reality and the imagination. For while

he desires to achieve perfection and being in paradise, he is anguished

at the thought that he is growing old and must say his final farewells

to life.

Decreation and Abstraction. Purity (abstraction) comes in the

thick of battle, when among 'ftobs of ten thousand, clashing together,/

This way and that,/ ...one man savager than the rest,/ Rose up, tallest

in the black sun" (p. 220). Stevens believes the "suave egg-diamond"

that the soldier clutches is somehow not appropriate, that he should be

clutching something else, but what, he doesn't know. Stevens realizes

that for him a cross is unreal, and furthermore that in our day it is

certainly not the appropriate thing on the battlefield. He desires

some emblem of purity, something sensuous one can hold on to. The art he craves to create is indeed such an emblem of purity.

In "Martial Cadenza" (p. 237), that "something other" is a pure,

inviolable, but indifferent star which is an enduring force in the uni­ 181 verse. In "The Man on the Dump" (p. 201), the most pure force comes to be a feeling of Intense fulfillment-- the "purifying change." In that poem, "the truth," Is expressed in the frail word "the" at the end of the poem, a word which, as we shall see In "Extracts.,," Is the basic

(essential, and therefore, abstract) connection that one man can es­ tablish with "something other." Finally intense affirmation and purity are expressed in the word "yes" and in the pronunclamentos that are Is­ sued In "3he Well Dressed Man With a Beard" (p. 247) and "Asides on the

Oboe" (p. 250).

The search for the purest reality that resides at the core of life leads Stevens in the poem "Hand as Being" (p. 271) back into the very beginning of time. "Our man," vaguely like Adam, coming Into an aware­ ness of himself, the woman, and the world, Is "too conscious of too many things at once." Her hand which "composed him" becomes the means by which a rushing multitude of perceptions Is stilled sufficiently to force his attention gently to her alone, then to his desire for her, then to act upon desire. We have a brief glimpse of the way the world looks to him In his innocence.

The wind had seized the tree and ha, and ha, It held the shivering, the shaken limbs, Then bathed its body in the leaping lake.

The hand initiates him into being, compels him to fasten his attention on one still thing. The hand, then, is to him what the star is to the soldier in "Martial Cadenza" and the "suave-egg-diamond” to the soldier in "Thunder by the*Musician." But the hand, by virtue of its being a 182

symbol of the absolute, Is Itself apart from humanity, dehumanized,

and the emotion expressed in that poem is, curiously, rather cold.

Wish-fulfillment, an ecstatic and passionate engagement of the

mind in Harmonium becomes in "Poem with Rhythms" (p. 2k5) a curiously

passionless affair. The shadow of the hand upon the wall makes Images

in which both the man and the woman believe so intensely that by the

end of the poem they have lost awareness that there is a candle, a hand,

a wall, and even a shadow on the wall. Fulfillment, for them, is not

expressed in exuberant emotions, however, but rather in a cold austere,

almost hypnotic response to "something other." Purification, then,

tends toward a limitation (restriction) of the numbers of particulars

that are to be affirmed in a scene, the range of colors and degree of motion. The noble figure in "The Candle a Saint" (p. 223) is austere,

remote, formidable, and tranquil in her motion-- herself a symbol of

the absolute: "the essential shadow,/ Moving and being, the image at

its source,/ The abstract, the archaic queen."

Stevens' mode of abstracting reality differs in certain major re­ spects from his modes of abstraction in Harmonium. He believes, first of all, that there is a powerful good residing at the core of war and evil. He tries to get at that good, the pure, by stripping away arti­ fice, so that what remains is naked, stark, abstract. Purity, then, is found not on the surface of things, but underneath, unless that sur­ face Itself happens to be naked and stark. Indeed abstraction goes far beyond the rather unstrenuous activity of extraction in Harmonium to deep excavations underground. The poet finds purity not when the ven­ erable beam of light shining from above Instructs him where to look, 183

"but when the surfaces of reality break down violently to reveal the ab­

solute concealed within. When, however, surfaces refuse to break down,

then the poet must relentlessly probe beneath them, like a miner dig­

ging for diamonds. The analogy between poet and miner perhaps is not

entirely fortuitous. For diamonds and bright and rare stones in sever­

al poems of Parts of a World frequently provide the sensuous details which symbolize theUlndlng radiance of the absolute.

Stevens attempts, then, to purify reality beyond a shadow of imper­

fection, color, and substance. Purification leads to unreality, to an

escape from the sensuous world and human experience, however rarefied.

But the Image of the abstract, glass man, in "Asides on the Oboe" (p.

250)•>-however grotesque is its purity— is Justified in termB of the meaning of the poem. From the beginning Stevens writes that "It is a question, now,/ Of final belief," which 'taust be in a fiction." Stevens is, of course, searching for a god to replace Christ and "That obsolete fiction, of the wide river in/ An empty land." He introduces the "phil­ osopher's man," saying that "If you say...man is not enough,../ ... however naked," — if you maintain that man himself, no matter how pure, is not pure enough— then you will certainly not be able to object to the purest, the most naked man of all, the "glass man." If everyone says no to man, then, writes Stevens,.one must say yes to something, even if it is only to the idea of a god, and not a real god. If reality itself falls to offer something pure enough to satisfy the mind, then

Stevens claims that we must be prepared to cut ourselves off from reality altogether. The message is noble. But the frightful implications of 184

those beliefs lead inexorably to the mad philosophy of the "nabob of bones" in "Landscape with Boat'.'

The unbelievable, unreal glass man is belief beyond belief. To go

so far as even to entertain the possibility of having to believe in what exists only as an ideal suggests that Stevens himself found real­

ity corrupted beyond redemption. In his earlier poems in Harmonium he

embraced reality and believed that it vas good enough to sustain us. He

celebrated objects without destroying their surfaces to discover some­ thing pure beneath. But in Parts of a World he comes to strip away re­ lentlessly at artifice, at surfaces, at reality, at man, hoping to pui* lfy everything until man is naked and clean.

Dressed in elegant velvet, Mrs. Uruguay claims that she has "said no/ To everything, in order to get at myself./ Iuhave wiped away moon­ light like m u d 1.' She wishes to purify herself, but because she is dres­ sed in heavy, rich, velvet, she knows she cannot achieve perfection. A romantic figure passes her by, a person of "capable imagination," sane- one "blind to her velvet." It is the noble rider, "A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair,/ Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces,/ Lost in an integration of the Martyr's bones,/ Rushing from what was real" to "The ultimate elegance." Like the woman in "The Hand as Being" the noble rider is stripped of artifice, "poorly dressed." He has no desire to announce his presence with symbols. The naked man is his own symbol. He stands for himself. His appearance and his action tell consummately what he is. He has need of neither art nor artifice.

These observations on symbol and being come to this: that whether being 185

Is expressed toy the blinding atostraction which produces the tolank canvas,

or toy the poetic act in reality to which, as Stevens writes in "Honors

and Acts," the artist himself adds nothing, art Itself is a thing of the

past. Atostraction, carried as far as it can toe, virtually guarantees

the annihilation of art.

But it does much more than even that. For carried to its most ex*

treme conclusion, it guarantees the annihilation of everything that is

human: not merely the toody, tout the senses, emotions, and finally mind.

All lose their dlstinctlveness in toeing atosortoed into the enormous un­

human reality that exists toeyond man. Though this is surely too enor­ mous a price to pay for atostraction, without it no art, meaning and life are possible. For atostraction gives man a glimpse of what lies toeyond

himself, since the "something other" toward which he instinctively moves as a way of fulfilling and knowing himself comes to toe the absolute.

Atostraction, therefore, gives him a glimpse of nature, of other men, and

finally of the reality toeyond men and nature, the larger universal scheme, protracting his life into infinity toy integrating time and eter­ nity. Without abstraction, therefore, man himself becomes the bleak, inscrutable fact, isolated from everything else, not knowing anyone or anything, including himself. But carried toeyond a certain point, ab­ straction implies a loss of self when the absolute is achieved and con­ sequently a cessation of desire, motion, Interest, concern and a total indifference•

In Parts of a World Stevens comes to realize that the greatest pur­ ity is the tolank canvas and the essence of man which itself is unhumeTy, 13

he was perplexed hy whether on not Stevens himself was aware that his

lecture was confusing. Obviously, if Stevens himself thought he was being lucid in these details on the imagination, he must have exercised poor judgment. But Stevens makes it clear that he knew precisely what he was doing, that his obscurity in the passage is intentional, for im­ mediately following the chaotic details of the passage Kermode refers to, he notes: "All this diversity, which I have intentionally piled up in the p confusion in this paragraph, is typical of the imagination." His greatest fear is that he will be too precise, when his purpose is to render only the "nature" of the thing he is talking about. For example, his definition of the word nobility is marked with deliberate obscurity:

"It was a part of reality, it was something that exists in life, some­ thing so true to us that is in danger of ceasing to exist, if we isolate it, something in the mind of a precarious tenure" (N.A., p.10). Trying to give a sense of "that nobility which is our spiritual height and depth," he insists

nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presen­ tations a horror of it. But there it is. The fact that it is there is what makes it possible to invite to the reading and writing of poetry men of intelligence and de­ sire for life. I am not thinking of the ethical or the sonorous or at all of the manner of it. The manner of it is, in fact, its difficulty, which each man must feel each day differently, for himself. I am notethinking of the solemn, the portentous or demoded. On the other hand, I am evading a definition. If it is defined, it will be fixed and it must not be fixed. As in the case of an ex-

2 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (New York, 1951)» P« 151* All further citations in my text to Stevens' work will be abbreviated as follows: N.A., The Necessary Angel: £•£•> The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, (New York, 1955); oTpT, Opus Posthumous (New York, 1957)• 186

Anything lees than the ultimate seems meaningless, unreal, artificial.

As though he were just ahout to surrender to the absolute, he comes to

realize In "Extracts From Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" (p.

252) that he cannot pay the price of dehumanization. Had he, Indeed, believed that the blank canvas, the greatest purity, vas the only goal he vould settle for, he might well, then, like the "nabob of bones” have written a treatise of self-contained logic, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the right thing to do is to pursue the neutral center.

Instead, placing man's welfare at the center of his concerns, his great­ est desire is to conceive of the abstract humanistically. But all he can do for the moment in "Extracts from Addresses..." is to try to under­ stand what it means to live without abstraction and what it means to live with too much abstraction. He is striving throughout for the pre­ cise degree of purity that will enable him to survive as a human being and to celebrate those things on earth that are noble and divine.

; ■

lithsr- Or* To live without abstraction is to fall to recognize any other order than the one of one's own mind. It is to pose as the single dominating force in the world. One may quietly reduce the world to words, to the concepts of one's mind. One may go so far as to con­ ceive of himself as God, the sole cause of the universe, creator and legislator of everything apart from himself. Or one may retreat into oneself and refuse to admit that he and anything else are alive. To live with too much abstraction is tobealominated and reduced by forces greater than oneself. To live without abstraction is to live virtually 187 alone. The ideal balance is achieved when one can knew that one’s mind can have a capable, though limited, control and understanding of itself and of things apart from it, that other beings share one’s ca­ pacities, and that nature and what exists beyond have their own digni­ ty and power which at times enter our lives, and at other times have their own existence apart from our awareness. Ideally, we must come to realize that everything is alive, in one form or another, that no­ thing threatens to dominate and annihilate anything else, but rather that everyone fulfills himself in the blending, in coming to terms, with everything else.

In the first extract Stevens shows the world as it appears not in the harmony of vibrant and living things, but as it is conceived, first without abstraction, and, thereupon, with too much abstraction. In both Instances reality is dead. In the first vision, the mind cannot see beyond Itself and reduces things apart from it into words. In the second, the speaker has tried to Imagine the torment one would suffer in forfeiting mind entirely in order to be one with the absolute. In the first view, reality as we think we have, mastered it through lan­ guage has been dehumanized, de-vitalized into concept. "A crinkled paper" that "makes a brilliant sound," "a false rose.” This sounding real­ ity, the reality we think we know when we appropriate language to it, is an "artificial world." For, Instead of expressing the life and mo­ tion Inherent in reality, the mind has reduced it to mere words.

The sea is so many written words; the sky Is blue, clear, cloudy, high, dark, wide and round. The mountains inscribe themselves upon the walls. 188

We assume that our casual perceptions disclose the Identity of the ob­ ject. But language, far from expressing vhat exists heyond, merely ex­ presses vhat exists only vlthln the mind, dissolving nature into the vague conceptions of the mind. The reality vhlch one thinks he knows and controls through language— reallty-as-language— Is an artifice.

Posed against this reality Is something far greater than man: the absolute, the real thing: "the silent rose of the sun/ And rain, the blood-rose living in Its smell." This reality has no sounds, no langupgp because it "belongs/ To naked men, to women naked as rain," unreal beings who do not speak. Theirs is a garden of Eden-like existence where

we, naked...(are) Beyond the knowledge of nakedness, as part Of reality, beyond the knowledge of what Is real, part of a land beyond the mind.

But while unreal beings may be happy In such a land, man himself cannot endure the experience of the absolute, of pure abstraction. For, if man's dominance over nature makes an ersatz reality, he cannot at the same time continue to exist altogether without mind, "beyond mind."

For existence without understanding

•••Is an unbearable tyranny. Sun Is A monster-maker, an eye, only an eye, A sharpener of shapes for only the eye, Of things no better than paper things, of days That are paper days.

Nature's dominance, then, would be an Insupportable tyranny. Things would be unbelievable, unreal, because man could not sanction the ex­ istence of what Is surely bound to torment and destroy him. The abso­ lute, then, seems to man even more unreal than the artificial world of words where man dominates everything, where the mind asserts Itself by 189

creating artifice and then takes It for the real thing. The artifi­

cial vorld of words, therefore, is false, when seen from the perspective

of the absolute, hut true for the being who lives vithout abstraction;

and the absolute is unreal to any human being. "The false and true are

one."

The absolute, the vorld beyond mind, becomes from Stevens' point

of view, just as false as the paper roses. The problem is to locate a

point of balance between man and the abstracted being, between mind and

no-mind, between dominance by man and dominance by "something other."

Instead of issuing in art, in the abstract humanistically conceived,

the antipodal strains fall in nightmare harmonies, reducing events and

objects in the world to artifice, but now an artifice that is macabre, no longer an innocuous paper rose. In a world, however imperfect, where man and the absolute have not been essentially integrated, so that nei­ ther threatens to destroy the other,

The eye believes and its communion takes. The spirit laughs to see the eye believe And its communion take.

And then, to illustrate the schizophrenia peculiar to this syhthesis,

Stevens expands the idea by a remarkable metaphor that makes nonsense of the grandest horror and the grandest horror of nonsense. "Let the

Secretary for Porcelain (for glazed surfaces, for artificial objects) observe":

That evil made magic, as in catastrophe, If neatly glazed, becomes the same as the fruit Of an emperor, the egg-plant of a prince The good is evil's last invention. The metaphor accounts for a continuum that embraces good and evil. (They are not Isolated polar forces). Metaphorically evil becomes good at the point where, glazed, It Is "fruit," tempting us by appetizing surfaces.

Deceived by appearances, we eat of it and are destroyed. Evil Is trans­ formed Into a good, only In as much as the tragic meanings implied in life are reduced to comic ugliness and triviality. "The eye equates ten thousand deaths/ With a single well-tempered apricot, or, say,/ An

egg-plant of good air." This is the way disaster looks to the eye that

sees the world-as-language, but without mind. The "Secretary of Porce­ lain," an administrator of the church, who can reduce evil by glazing

it prettily into a "well-tempered apricot," is the vicious, hypocrltic double, "the something other" as persecutor.

The speaker then asks the gentlemen of the academy to attend "to the laughter of evil," to the laughter of the magician who can reduce ten thousand deaths in a twinkling to the size of an apricot, and of the evil spirit that dissociates Itself from all that the eye participates in. But laughter comes now as the only means of relief. The tragedy of life has become so preposterous, we dan sob only "For breath to laugh the louder," gasp only to uplift "...the completest rhetoric of sneers."

Then, stunned to sobriety after the parable of madness can draw no more laughter, the speaker grows compassionate, for all those who die, for himself. Death Is a good after all as a release from this mad parable that seems so monstrous because it transforms death into a piece of fruit, a blade of grass, a stone. "It is good death/ Haat puts an end to evil death and dies." As If to soothe the laughter and wailing of 191

the insane, he repeats: "Be tranquil in your wounds," and gives a com­

forting promise of something sane and beautiful that can yet be believed

in:

The placating star Shall be the gentler for the death you die And the helpless philosophers say still helpful things. Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird.

The third extract reviews the problems in finding a new order of belief.

The metaphor of the old world (Europe) is set against that of the new

(America); of obsolete, institutionalized religions against an evangel­

ism that can find no appropriate forms; of intermediaries against a

classless society in which "all men are priests;” of the social con­

tract that made the body politic possible against the social contract

that must make belief possible. Although the earnestness that drives men to seek these forms is heroic, their efforts are doomed to fall.

"If they could" find an intercessor to build the nave of faith, but they

cannot. Without someone to media telbetveen oneself and vhat is in and

beyond the world, where does one begin in building belief? What precise­

ly is there to celebrate? What to desire? What to pray for?

As if to locate a cause for their Inevitable rout, he asks:

Or is it the multitude of thoughts, Like Insects in the depths of the mind, that kill The single thought? The multitudes of men That kill the single man, starvation's head, One man, their bread and their remembered wine?

Multitudes, all clammering to be heard, to be their own priests, have murdered their only hope of spiritual sustenance. All of them franti­

cally desiring to commune with the absolute have killed "the single man",

the "one man" among them, the genuine priest who could have harmonized 192 all of them. In comparison to all of the priests ,fthat hill/ The single thought," "The lean cats of the arches..." seem like a minor miracle; they comfortably 'Hask in the sun." They seem as though "designed by X, the per-noble master,"-- a single man vho emerged at one time from the multitude to give them "a sense of their design," of their ideal purpose^ and at the same time to enable them to "savor/ The sunlight." The cats, bearing ,rbrightly the little beyond/ Themselves," are an image of art, not artifice, vhere the minds of the "genius," the artist, has created objects that enjoy their earthly existence in the sunlight and point dimly beyond into eternity.

The "early Sunday in April" of the fourth extract could be Easter

Sunday, a day of regeneration and rejoicing that, given the defeat im­ mediately preceedlng, has become "a feeble day," cold, grey and desolate.

It is the cruel month of April. The speaker seems rather detached, un­ concerned about anything apart from him. He felt merely "curious about the winter hills." And he merely "vondered about the water in the lake."

His responses are deadened. His only coranent on the dreary progress of winter from December's cold to the first thaw of April is the dry obser­ vation: "Hie wind blew in the empty place." He has not noticed the change in the weather. The question is, has he, indeed, noticed anything at all? Of course, he cannot very easily observe anything, if he does not happen to be there in the first place. And so we see him walking

"about the winter hills" and both being there and not being there at the same time, first observing "The wind blew in the empty place," and later observing, "The wind blew in an empty place." He comments on the slight linguistic difference between a and the. 193

That vas the difference "between the and an The difference "between himself and no man, No man that heard a wind in an empty place.

He knows that In that slight linguistic shift from the to a^one is moved beyond himself into a place which he sees as a part of him and which he sees himself a part of. To feel that the wind blows in the place means that one is somehow drawn into it, involved in it; to feel it is a place is to have the place be anywhere, to have it be cut off from him, and, therefore, to feel no concern and interest in it, as though it did not exist. His capacity to feel the place would prove that he is alive. To be able to observe the difference between Decem­ ber and April would make him realize that he had emerged from "no man" to something alive once again. He cannot achieve such rejuvenation in an instant. Still half dead, half alive, half man, half no-man, he con­ tinues; merely "curious," to observe dryly "If the place, in spite of its witheredness, was still/ Within the difference."

There is, then, established a very fundamental law of relationship between man and nature, one that is so imperceptible (because so simple, so basic) that it threatens to elude him, but one nonetheless, so vital to his existence and nature's that, in its absence, man loses being and nature loses location and its own order of existence. If man is to re­ main alive, moving toward something beyond himself, he is perforce de­ pendent upon nature located within the mind's grasp. But the first step comes from the mind, stirred from complete indifference and isolation to wonder about something apart from itself. Anonymous and uncelebrated, the is the delicate link in between man and "something other" that leads 19U him hack to life. And holding on toft with passionate intensity— since his very life depends upon it— he begins to vork his way hack to wholeness once again.

Will the elements hrlng him hack to life or must he he the one to initiate the rites of spring? If, When he looked, the water ran up the air or grew white Against the edge of the ice, the abstraction would Be broken and winter would he broken and done, And being would he being again, Being, becoming seeing and feeling and self Black water breaking reality.

This is the metaphor for the metaphysic of spring, for regeneration in a time of disbelief in which man and his sense of the world are threaten­ ed with annihilation. It is also a very real state of feeling which may issue affirmatively— as it does in part VI— when the mind once again establishes contact with something apart from itself. The emotions that man experiences when he knows that both he and nature are alive (when he is not deadened and dominated, nor dominates nature by reducing it to paper flowers) are more fully examined in parts VI and VII. Meanwhile as if to explore the implications of a defeat of the final wish that ends the fourth extract, Stevens peculates about the "law of chaos” which in the past has guaranteed that "the abstraction would/ Be broken and win­ ter would be broken and done,/ And being would be being himself again..."

What must be corroded are ice, rock, Indifference, detachment— in a word, "abstraction," as Stevens himself wrltesl Identifying abstraction with ice in this extract, Stevens indicates that he is aware of the po­ tentially destructive meanings of abstracting, the activity that stands at the core of his aesthetics. To crash down order— thought crusted like chunks of ice-- one re­ quires chaos: "Three or four/ Ideas, or say, five men, or, possibly six," The warfare among these "philosophic assasins (who) pull/ Re­ volvers and shoot each other" comes to a glorius end when "One remains," and "The mass of meaning becomes composed again." Motion is followed by periods of calm which must be blasted away by disorder. The idea and the man that survive are the fittest and the best. Ifce music of the victor egresses the "mass of meaning./ And yet it is a singular romance,/ This warmth in the blood-world for the pure idea.” His song unites the abstract and the particular, the idea with the lived exper­ ience.

The harmonizing idea is contrasted in the sixth extract with "sys­ tematic thinking." To believe in concepts is "to think the way to death.” But the hero, having survived, wants "to think his way to life." To think one's way back to life requires that he once again measure his thought against vhat is outside him (it), for in "Elysia," the euphoria he senses, after fcaving made it back from the realm of non- being to which he was almost consigned, makes for a too simple balance between the mind and the world without* The balance results in no gross distortion of either one; indeed, it comes with an exceedingly comfort­ able accommodation, inythe happiness of not thinking too much: "He want­ ed that,/ To face the weather and be unable to tell/ How much of it was light and how much thought,/ In these Elysia..." Except for the poems ve make and our other creative acts, we could rest in this comfortable oblivlousness, having, supremely, confidence in the world and in the fact that it is "half earth, half mind;/ Half sun, half thinking of the sun; Copyright by

Georgianna Wuletich Lord 14 ternal thing, nobility resolves itself into an enormous number of vibrations, movements, changes. To fix it is to put an end to it (N.A., p. 34)■

Writing about poetry, he notes in the same vein: "In spite of the ab­ sence of a definition and in spite of the impressions and approxima­ tions we are never at a loss to recognize poetry" (p.44). Having given to whatever definitions of poetry he might attempt an open-ended quali­ ty, he postulates "a center of poetry, a vis or noeud vital," but one which again eludes definition. That "center" is in part "a process of the personality of the poet," ant "element, the force that keeps poetry a living thing”: "There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none" (p. 46).

The source of power, vitality, life, Stevens believed, is not to be found in the definition; if the definition itself seems to have any pow­ er, life has; as it were;asserted itself in spite of definition: "...we find in Coleridge, dressed in black, with large shoes and black worsted stockings, dancing on the deck of a Hamburg packet, a man who may be said to have been defining poetry all his life in definitions that are valid enough but which no longer impress us primarily by their validity" (p. 46).

What he claims invariably impresses us is the multiplicity of associa­ tions that Coleridge himself, by the power of his personality, evokes.

Stevens, then, prizes the poet who gives one an "unofficial view of be­ ing," as opposed to the philosopher, whose view is "official." The achievement of the poet is not to be measured by the "meanings" he attri­ butes to certain words, but by his genius for plucking the blue guitar of language so that through new and magical sounds he can insinuate pure 196 half sky,/ Half desire for indifference about the sky." But the mind, his mind, cannot settle for facile solutions. Knowing, therefore, that "it cannot be half earth, half mind;/ Half sun, Half thinking," he struggles to "produce the redeeming thought."

In the seventh extract, he describes how one would feel If the mind were finally satisfied. The mind is brought to life, not at the expense of reducing nature to language. But, as though it were unaware of pre* clsely what it had annihilated, it looks at the world— a world not merely distorted by the mind, but one that would not even exist, would not even be substantial, were the mind net there to perceive it and give it substance. The "something other" exists because the mind happens to exist at the same time in the same place. Take it away from the mind, it instantly loses its being. It can be so intensely identified with the mind, that no matter how many destructions it might in the course of life suffer, the "something other" would still exist for the mind, as long as the mind Itself, which sanctions its existence, is alive. If one sanctions its existence, then that "something other” will continue to exist for the mind, even if in reality it has been destroyed. If one rejects it, however, then it will, as far as the mind is concerned, dissolve immediately, even if in reality it still continues to exist:

To have satisfied the mind and turn to see. (That being as much belief as we may have,) And turn to look and say there is no more Than this, in this alone I may believe, Whatever it may be; then one’s belief Resists each past apocalypse, rejects Ceylon, wants nothing from the sea, la belle Aux crinolines, smears out mad mountains. 197

It can "reject Ceylon," because If he is not in Ceylon, Ceylon does not exist. It can "smear out mad mountains," blot out mountains some*? where because they are not vhere he is. Nothing is there unless he is there. And that is the important thing for him. "What/ One believes is vhat matters," and not whether Ceylon is really there in spite of one's absence from it. In these "ecstatlto identles" that the mind creates (of man at one vith all things in a given locale), were one to pull him out of vhat, having created, he Intensely derives his being from, he would surely die. He could not survive in a place that he has not by his presence made. And, therefore, the moon becomes a place, not the place, vhich, were he to dwell there, would drown him in its

"air of difference..." But, having once had belief and after an imag­ ined departure ( a moment on the moon), should he return to his proper milieu (one he has himself made), he would discover at its "subtle cen­ ter" how much of him (one's place) it was and how much of it itself.

Half-poetically, half-conceptually, Stevens attempts to project a qual­ ity of feeling at the core of his sensibility: the mind's assertion of itself in the very process of losing its sense of its own distinctive­ ness. This fusion of an assertion of one's identity and a loss of iden­ tity is one of the ways by vhich man can resolve the Impossible choice he is faced with in the either-or dichotomy of the first extract. The relationship between place and mind having been established, man becomes at once part of nature and abstracted from it; conversely, nature is brought into a vital relationship with man, even as it remains unaltered by the mind. 198

The sixth extract begins in resignation: "We live In a camp."

A prison camp? an armed camp? the camp of the body? the artificial vorld that our own minds have created? the camp of the absolute tyran­ nizing the mind? The endless warfare between the contrary beliefs that the mind is the most powerful force in the universe which domi­ nates all things , and that "something other" is the most powerful force which enslaves the mind: this is a dialectic between two kinds of evil. From this struggle, what "redeeming thought," what good can come? "Stanzas of final peace," deep "in the heart's residuum," re-echo

Stevens' deepest desire for peace and resolution, for an armistice be­ tween the mind and something other. But that lyrical expression of de­ sire is to the very end of the poem corroded by scepticism and ques­ tioning. He is tormented by the desire to know precisely how such re­ solution will be achieved, whether, indeed, it ever will be achieved.

Season prods him incessantly to question, but can issue in no satis­ factory answers which would still all further need to question.

But would it be amen in choirs, if once In total war we died, and after death Returned, unable to die again, fated To endure thereafter every mortal wound, Beyond a second death, as evil's end?

Even when logic seems to lead only to fatal conclusions, he still cries out for peace: "Ihe chants of final peace/ Lie in the heart's residuum."

But scepticism is deeply entrenched and the dialectic continues relent­ lessly.

How can We chant if we live in evil and afterward Lie harshly burled there? 199

Destruction and fulfillment, evil and good, are expressed together at one sublime and agonizing moment, when he would try to "pierce the heart's residuum,/ And there to find music for a single line,” to find the song, the art, that will Join the absolute and the human. But the ecstatic identity of evil and good cannot be sustained for more than an instant. Harmony breaks down; and, after a final pause, he perceives the tarnished helmets of the men, watches the soldiers marching off to war.

The speaker in the "Extracts" meditates from a point of existence outside the sphere of life and it is altogether proper that, returning to it in the final part, he should feel trapped by it. The final long­ ing is for a release from evil; but the release— whether in life or in death— cannot be absolute, peace will never be final. Meditating, re- moved from life, he beholds those men who also must know that earth is evil; but they do not draw back from it. Theirs is a heroic march for­ ward into certain disaster:

Behold the men in helmets borne on steel, Discolored, how they are going to defeat.

The strongest compassion that Stevens ever expressed for anyone in his poems is for the soldier in time of war. He desires to share his ex­ perience, to place himself imaginatively right at the soldier's side in the thick of battle. The first stanza of "Examination of the Hero in

Time of War” (p. 273), begins with a bitterly ironic variation of the

Twenty-third psalm: "Force is my lot:" and then: "Death is my/ Master and, without light, I dwell." Preparing for battle, each man speaks

"of/ The brightness of aims." Weapons symbolize "the will opposed to 200

the cold." Their wills, their arms: these are "wings subtler than

any mercy," the veiled prophecies of their sybils, the masters of

their fate. Yet the thought of God, the other master, Is still alive

In them, "lhe Got whonrwe serve is able to deliver/ Us." He does

not add the phrase, "from evil," and for very good reason. How can a

soldier be delivered from evil If he knows that he must kill or be

killed? "What of that angelic sword?" His gun, his sword: these, and

not God, are the masters which will save him. It Is to the machine

gun. that the soldier prays: "Creature of/ Ten times ten times dyna­

mite, convulsive/ Angel, convulsive shattered, gun;” As he fires the

machine gun, he praises it In spurts and thinks at the same time about

God. "Click, click" of the gun slices his thoughts to shreds:

Angel, convulsive shatterer, gun Click, click, the Got whom we serve Is able, Still, still to deliver us, still magic, Still moving yet motionless In smoke still One with us, in the heaved-up noise, still.••

Moving motionless In smoke, "One with us," angel, gun, and god— a

multitude of Ideas "Collect...together Into one,/ Into the single

thought" of the living god, the "Captain, the man of skill, the expert/

Leader, the creator of bursting color/ And rainbow sortilege, the sav­

age weapon/ Against enemies, against the prester," against God. The burst of color from bombs and gunfire seems to the soldier a forecast

of his future. The captain, like a god, moves through this brilliant blaze of fire as though it were his celestial palace.

The soldiers "are sick of each old romance, returning," sick and

tired of old worn-out beliefs. They are through with "the (same old) 201

music/ Like a euphony In a museum/ Of euphonies." They want brutal

sounds like the music of their guns and the sound of their own speech

made rough and real by war. The hero Is the sum of everything: a

museum of art, a heaven and the future. And combat has its ecstasies,

Its own "sudden sublimations,” In "bursting color," Its "exaltations?

Its divine "fury."

But what of the hero himself? Who Is he? By what acts Is he made

heroic? Stevens tries to "grasp the hero" in heroic postures: "On a

horse,/ In a plane, at the piano/ At the piano, scales, arpeggios/ And

chords hi ^ " As the music becomes more intense and agitated, it takes

him in his meditations "beyond the oyster-beds, indigo/ Shadow, up the

great sea and downward..," finally cascading into an abyss: "The sig­

nal • . . The sea-tower, shaken/ Sways slightly and the pinnacles fris­

son./ The mountain collapses. Choplnlana." The captain is not the

only soldier who is the hero; every man goes down with the ship. He

Is the "common man." "Common, common," Stevens repeats again and again and then Instructs us: "Imprimatur": write that down and remember itI

And then "there's common fortune," "Induced" nonchalantly, as though

it were "She improvisations of the cuckoos/ In a clock shop." Here,

the reductionism from the sublime to the trivial— the comic spirit—

is not Stevens', not anyman's, but rather that of the sybil who irre­

sponsibly improvises the destiny of everyone, as though she were merely

entertaining herself. The soldier is told to think "in the darkness" about his obscure, absurd fate and to repeat the modest orders he must heroically carry out: "your appointed paces/ Between two neatly mea­ 202

sured stations,/ Of less neatly measured common-places."

But vhat if ve object to this ordinary vision of a hero, whose

actions are circumscribed within "two neatly measured stations"? No .

matter, says Stevens. For there is nothing left to believe in. "Un­

less we believe in the hero, what is there/ To believe?” He gives an

order to create the hero. "Devise. Make him of mud,/ For every day.

In a civiler manner,/ Devise, devise, and make him of winter's/ Iciest

core, a north star, cedral/ In our oblivions." The hero is to have

the mind of winter, desiring nothing for himself, and, too, "summer's

imagination, the golden rescue" of everyone. He will be our Christ,

"The bread and wine of the mind," a god in our midst, made of mud and

ice, "Living and being about us and being/ Ours, like a familiar com­

panion. " In order to be our "familiar companion" beside us at all

times, he must appear in some symbcHc form. What form, then, will he

take? And who is to give it to him?

The artist, trying to live up to the challenge, desires to arrive

at the essence of the hero. Observing the statues of heroes, Stevens writes: "The marbles are pinching of cm idea,/ Yet there is that idea behind the marbles,/ The idea of things for public gardens.” When

does that idea, however, cease to be merely "The ideas of things for public gardens,/ Of men salted to public ferns" and become the idea of

the hero? The answer that is implied is never. The idea of the hero

eludes the statue, as "The hero/ Glides (unnoticed, silently) to his meeting like a lover/ Mumbling a secret, passionate message." 203

Hov can the statue represent the hero If "The hero Is not a person"?

His essence has nothing -whatsoever to do with "his head, nor his horse

nor knife, nor/ Legend" vhich falsify the heroic helng. Yet as Stevens

vrltes in stanza DC, to celebrate the person himself would be better than

to praise "the emblem/ Of him" vhich

seems To stand taller than a person stands, has A wider brow, large and less human Eyes, bruted ears: the man-like body Of a primitive.

The grotesque elevation of the hero transforms him into a primitive, a

giant, a monster. And that"phenomenon," the emblem of the hero, can

be yet further

.• .magnified, sua voluntate, Beyond his circumstance, projected High, low, far, vide, against the distance, In parades like several equipages, Fainted by mad-men, seen as magic, Leafed out in adjectives as private And peculiar and appropriate glory, Even enthroned on rainbows in the sight Of the fishes of the sea, the colored Birds and people of this too voluminous Air-earth— ...

In this unholy communion, this "profane parade," a vulgar desecration

of the dead, the skeleton of the hero throws off "The flesh on the

bones," "His crust," and eats of this bitter, rotten meat, "drinks/

Of this tabernacle, this communion,/ Sleeps in the sun no thing recal­

ling."

How, Stevens asks, "Can we live on dry descriptions"? Hov can we allow the hero to be mutilated in parades and in sculpture? Hov can we reduce him to anything at all? He is not even a person, not even a 201+

"he." Hie hero is an "it," and'It Is not an image. It is a feeling./

There is no image of the hero." Feeling abstracts the hero from any > public ceremonies. To know the hero, ve must feel him. There is no substitute for feeling, and no form that can express that feeling. For all the forms are unreal. But

The hero Acts in reality, adds nothing To vhat he does. Be is the heroic Actor and act but not divided. It is part of his conception, That he be not conceived, being real.

Any representation of the hero, of the real man— no matter hov faithful— must be rejected on the grounds that it falsifies the hero, vho belongs in reality and cannot be abstracted from it vithout ceasing to exist.

This theme implied in "Examination of a Hero," contrasts starkly to a statement Stevens made in "The Noble Rider..,” that the poet must ab­ stract nobility from reality and preserve and enhance its form vithout mutilating It. In Harmonium Stevens came to reject the sensuous vorld because It failed to provide things sufficiently noble to satisfy the noble mind. In "Ideas of Order" he craved something sufficiently/to believe, in order to give It sane form that he could cherish as the thought of heaven. Nov in Parts of a World he discovers something real that can be called supremely noble: the hero. But the greatest Irony Is that in the meantime, he has denied categorically that any representation of the hero, vhether in sculpture, in parade, or in ritual, can possibly do him justice. Hi the face of the Immense beauty, nobility, and hero­ ism inherent in reality itself, the pover and dignity of art vither in­ to "crumbs of vhimsy" (C.P., p. 278). 205

What hope, then, is there for the artist? What is his role, whose vision of nobility fades like paper roses beside the vibrant poetic act in reality? Will there never be a worthy emblem for the hero, a new religion and ritual? linages of the hero will be replaced by hymns praising the hero and intensifying our "ecstatic identity" with him. Feeling Itself will come to penetrate to the essence of the hero. In part XV, with feelings half grotesque, half sublime, he celebrates the hero at its source— not as person, nor as emblem, nor as reality— but finally as abstraction, the highest reality, the most powerful force in the universe:

The highest man with nothing higher Than himself, his self, the self that embraces fhe self of the hero, the solar single, Man-sun, man-moon, man-earth, man-ocean, Makes poems on the syllable fa or Jumps from the clouds....

But joy and fulfillment come in knowing that "Each false thing ends.”

And so, when the blaring hymn of praise "jangling the savagest diamonds and/dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons" comes to an end, then the real ;thlhg'ratiarns,; "True'.autumn," the "veritable season," like the

"large, the solitary figure" of the hero. For him every moment of tran­ quility is like an intermission between acts of an unwritten, unspoken tragedy. Without Bpeaking, therefore, he glides from the joyful fanfare of his farewell, quietly preparing himself for death.

In the following chapter we examine the three long poems which present Stevens* sustained poetic meditations on life, evil, and art. 15

and rare feelings. As Stevens writes in "The Noble Rider and the Sound

of Words,"

And what about the sound of words? What about nobility, of which the fortunes were to be a kind of test of the value of the poet? I do not know of anything that will appear to have suffered more from the passage of time than the music of poetry and that has suffered lesB. The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us lis­ ten to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them (N.A., pp.31-32).

Stevens1 harshest critics contend that his love of the sound of words

reveals an evasion of responsibility; for, loving the sound of words more than stable structures, he willingly lets meaning dissolve in "a multiplicity of associations." Thus his slightest poems and his most

ambitious have alike been criticized for their obscurity; evenhis sym­ pathetic readers concede that they resist paraphrase. Again, Stevens himself intended that his poems resist facile and heavy-handed para­ phrase. Paraphrase for him fixes the substance of the poem; like nobil­

ity and the imagination, poetry cannot be isolated, fixed or defined without "ceasing to exist."

If anything, he hopes that the ideas which he expresses will give

life to the imagination rather than stifle it by restricting meaning.

His aim is to be expansive rather than limiting. For this reason, when he begins in The Necessary Angel to "add my own definition to poetry’s many definitions," his own definitions turn out to be "one of the en­ largements of life." It is his view of definition as being expansive They may be described as a dialogue between himself and ''Vocalissimus,'1 the voice of the gods in the distance. It is as though for the final time Stevens vere "...judging and rejudging what...had (been) done in the past, with the object of arriving at a state of mind equivalent to an illusion" (O.P., p. 27^). His Involvement with evil and death in

"The Man with the Blue Guitar" and Parts of a World has rendered the vision tragic and noble. Wow, in the end; transcending through medi­ tation the experience of suffering and death; the poet and his sense of the vorld are transfigured; made tranquil and serene. CHAPTER V

THE PERFECTED SPIRIT AND THE GENIUS OF EVIL

Abstraction humanistically expressed in art is realized as a

hymn of peace deep vlthln the "heart's residuum." But the hymn lasts

much too briefly, for only a single stanza 3.ike that in "Examination

of a Hero in Time of War." At the end of that poem, hymn and hero

part and go their own ways. The identity— of the illusion of iden­

tity— between imagination and reality, between hymn and hero, is sus­

tained for a brief moment and then breaks down. But at the end of

"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," hero and hymn are reconciled once

again. In Parts of * World and Transport to Sumner Stevens expresses

his anguish in being alienated from his earthly being and his desire

to transcend his human limitations. Nov, in "Notes toward a Supreme

Fiction," he seems no longer tormented by being trapped in the body.

For in the very beginning of "Notes...," he seems already to have tran­

scended his human limitations and to have achieved a vision of the ab­

solute. The desire for revelation is no sooner satisfied, however, than he feels nostalgic for the earth. And like a disembodied spirit in

search of corporeal form, he plunges earthward once again.

In "ibtes..." Stevens expresses the absolute humanistically con­ ceived: the highest reality as seen through human eyes. His vision of being resolves the either-or view of life that anguished him in "Ex­ tracts from Addresses..." and in "Examination of a Hero..." either that helpless dependence upon mother earth which suckles her young and pro-

207 208 vldes them with a grave; or suicidal flights Into a hypesthetlc beyond.

Having perceived paradise, Stevens is pulled back to earth for the last time in "Notes...." There, in his “present state of blessedness" (p.

3 7 8 ), he envisions the earth illumined, Idealized, defined as a supreme fiction.

"Poetry and Apotheosis"

In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" (C.P. p. 380), Stevens does not attempt to overwhelm us vith major men, diamonds, central meta­ phors, and oracular wisdom. At no time do ve feel the austere formali­ ty and tsutness of the public address delivered by a person who feels he has the right to speeds: like a grand old. man, or, in his delusions of grandeur, to Impersonate Jesus Christ. Rather, the air of relaxa­ tion and improvisation puts us Immediately at ease. Instead of issu­ ing oracular pronuncldmentos, he speaks with a patience and wisdom that calls to mind Socrates. Indeed, the resemblance between Stevens and

Socrates, on the one hand, and the ephebus and Phaedrus, on the other, may have been Intended— perhaps inspired by Valery's "Eupalinos," which Stevens praised so highly in the first of "Two Bref aces" in the

Opus Posthumous. But, aside from Valery's prose masterpiece, which -p:r prompts one to compare Stevens and Socrates, the very tone of "Notes...” strongly suggests the tone of the Socratic dialogues: the wise, gentle air of Socrates, the ease and patience that reflects the love he feels for his youthful listener* Stevens does not strive aggressively to 209 convince the ephebus of any of his beliefs. Rather, with lucidity,

composure, and ease he performs one transformation(variation) after another of the central theme: man's perceptions of the absolute. Ve are put at ease and yet gently stirred to life by the insinuation of new and refreshing meanings.

In the brief prologue, Henry Church, to whom "Notes toward a

Supreme Fiction" is dedicated, is addressed as though he were alive.

Perhaps he is the ephebus addressed in the beginning lines of the first poem. If so, then the quasi-lyrical, quasi-dramatic monologue

of Stevens speaking to a being in paradise establishes from the very beginning the analogy between earth and heaven. This synthesis of earth and paradise is suggested strongly by the fact that Stevens "meets" Hen­ ry Church not in a specific place, but "in the uncertain light of a single certain truth," $hd "in the central of our being,/ The vivid tr transparence," Stevens, as it were, steps to the verge of conscious­ ness to meet the ephebus, who seems to be a remote being in paradise.

At the same time, the ephebus is the tender young boy whom Stevens in­ vites to engage in the sublime improvisation of a "Supreme Fiction.”

He tells the ephebus to "Begin," then tells him how: "...by per­ ceiving the idea/ Of this invention, this invented world,/ The incon­ ceivable Idea of the sun" (I). But poor ephebe probably doesn't know how to do this. And so he is wisely Instructed: "You must become an ignorant man again." Stevens tells him: if you want to perceive the absolute, you must begin at the beginning, at "the enormous a priori": that is, not at this invention (the poem, or the world) but at the 210

Idea of that invention, the potential of that invention. We begin, he

writes then, with "The inconceivable idea of the sun”; the idea is in­

conceivable because we ourselves never conceived it and because ve can

hardly think of vhat that Idea must have been before it was actualized

in the sun Itself. "Never suppose an inventing mind as source/ Of

this idea nor for that mind compose/ A voluminous master folded in his

fire." For in the beginning, before mind, there existed only the Idea,

abstract, detached from any thinking being. TO perceive that idea,

one must try to divest oneself altogether of mind, and "be an Ignorant

man again/ And see the sun again vith an Ignorant eye."

Once Stevens and the ephebuB (Socrates and Phaedrus) have had a

vision of that idea (image fused vith idea signifies revelation),

Socrates exclaims: "How clean the sun vhen seen in its idea,/ Washed

in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven/ That has expelled us and our

images.,," To be able to see hov pure the first idea is, one must see

it without any image as intercessor between oneself and it. Miracu­

lous sight, revelation beyond the senses is paradoxically the non-sen­

suous image of paradise. To see things without images, one gains an

Intimation of both heaven as a place and men as disembodied beings.

What is that vision, that pure idea, the enormous a priori as seen by

the "ignorant eye"? That, of course, Stevens can never describe. For

he can only say that he has had a vision. He cannot express it in words as a thing in itself. To be described, it must be conceived humanisti­

cally.

The idea, pure and eternal, is emancipated from time and space. 211

It is indestructible, without beginning and end. The temporal beings

that we identify with that idea, however, are finite. The death of one

forecasts the death of all. In naming these finite beings, we think we

are naming their immortal essence. "But Phoebus was/ A name for some­

thing that never could be named.” It seems that once, "before we were

wholly human and knew ourselves" (p. 317 > Italics mine), we lived in a

kind of Garden of Eden. We had no knowledge of anything. We only ex­

perienced the absolute as Inseparable from sensuous reality. As non­

humans beings we had never tried to think at all, to abstract idea from

object, and to think of ourselves as somehow distinct from the things

about us. Without mind, we lived in a state of unity where ve experi­

enced only the illusion of a motionless state made possible through

ceaseless repetition. But suddenly in "The celestial ennui of apart­

ments" (II) we sought relief from that sublimely monochrome existence.

We were brought to life "by the first idea, the quick/ Of this inven­

tion, ” and became human, for the first time, like Adam and Eve once

they were cast out of paradise. She first idea that we ever had, like

the food from the tree of knowledge, "is so poisonous/ ...the ravish­

ments of truth, so fatal to/ The truth Itself". For in the act of

knowing for the first time, we broke down the boundaries, the limita­

tions of the "celestial apartments." Then, for the first time we be­

came aware of mind as existing distinct within the body, as ourselves

existing as distinct, as apart from place. We broke the marriage bond,

the unity, of heaven and earth and alienated ourselves through mind

from the sensuous world. We come to life as human beings through mind, 212 through abstraction. But our humanity substitutes only one kind of boredom vith another. For the price of our curiosity was the single

Idea, vhlch "comes and goes and comes and goes all day," "The hermit

In a poet's metaphors."

Will that suffice? "What else, prodigious scholar, should there be?" The mind, however, is never satisfied. It craves whatever it does not have:

And not to have is the beginning of desire. To have what is not is its ancient cycle. It is desire at the end of winter...(il).

Man has the hermit, the first idea; with it he can live only in a monastery. What he lacks is the metaphors of the poet. The ennui which results when idea and metaphor can only be experienced singly is canceled out completely by the poem which at once, by embracing both idea and metaphor, effects a symbolic reconciliation between idea and sensuous reality, abstraction (mind) and body, heaven and earth.

The poem, as it dispels that ennui which non-human beings suffered in paradise, achieves a state of being superior to that primordial, "myth­ ic" synthesis of heaven and earth. The poems that follow disclose the relationship between the eternal presence of the "first idea" and the changing metaphors, the changing names by which men call it. That change is brought about by the mind which "knows that what it has is what is not/ And throws it away like a thing of another time,/ As mor­ ning throws off stale moonlight and shabby sleep."

The artist gives flesh to the first idea, by composing a poem which refreshes life so that ve share, For a moment, the first idea. • • It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning

And sends us, vinged by an unconscious vlll, To an Immaculate end. Ve move between these points... (III).

With what eaae the distances of infinite time and space are traversed!

"It satisfies/ Belief in an Immaculate beginning/ And sends us, vinged

by an unconscious vlll,/ To an immaculate end." What strong and pure

emotionsevoked: "the candor," "the strong exhilaration," "An elixir,

an excitation, a pure pover." The first idea takes many kinds of forms,

as, for example, the grossly "primitive astronomy" of "an Arabian in my

room,/ With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how," throwing "his stars

around the floor." Even here the first idea is disclosed as "Life's

nonsense pierces us with strange relation."

Once again Stevens emphasizes that "The first idea was not our

own." (IV). Man did not create it, nor did Adam himself "In Eden."

Bather, Adam and Eve "found themselves/ In heaven as in a glass.” And

when they were cast our of paradise, they found themselves "The inhab­

itants of a very varnished green." They did not know how they evolved

from a reflection of themselves in reality to an image of things apart

from them, from which they thought they were alienated since they

could not find their own reflections. All they knew is that there they

were, with the clouds now in betveen them and what they had lost for­

ever. No man, not even Adam, was responsible for "The first idea,"

the "myth." For "There was a myth before the myth began,/ Venerable and articulate and complete." There was a potential idea, a source for all myths, for every invention: of the sun, of man, of the poem. And "From

this the poem springs." Every poem expresses the condition of our life

alienation: "that ve live in a place/ That is not our own and, much ;

more, not ourselves/ And hard it is in spite of blazoned days." Our

powers are limited: "He are the mimics”; ve look into the air, expect­

ing like Eve to see an image of ourselves. But "The air is not a mir­

ror but bare board." We try to add "sweeping meanings" to the sounds

ve make; but the sounds themselves, made on "Abysmal instruments" which

give sound to the pure conception of the first idea in the poet's mind

degrade the idea at the very moment that it is articulated. After each

failure, the poet tries once again to express the inexpressible. In

each attempt he fulfills his desire to do the impossible even as he

falls pitifully to express the pure idea in his mind. Every success,

therefore, is a failure, every new beginning an end, which motivates

the ceaseless search for perfection.

The following five poems (V through X) in the section "It must

Be Abstract" describe the predicament, emotions, dreams, and achieve­

ments of man, fallen from Eden, striving once again to achieve harmony

and bliss. In poem V, everything on earth, animal and man alike, rages

against its finite existence: the lion raging against the desert; man,

exhausted by his misery, writhing and in his frustration pressing "A

.bitter utterance from your writhing, dumb,/ Yet voluble dumb violence."

That violence of beasts is contained by the artist so that, no longer

inconsequential rage, it is sublimated in order. That vailing for pu­

rity and peace is quieted in "the heroic children whom time breeds/ 215

Against the first Idea— to lash the lion,/ Caparison elephants, teach hears to Juggle."

The poet gazes outside his window "Across the roofs." If he could only see the delicate nuances of pure idea, as in the "Weather by

Franz Hals,/- Brushed up by brushy vinds in brushy cbuds,/ Wetted by blue, colder for white," if only he could see how the "yellow thins the Northern blue," then he would be content to live a monastic exis­ tence, content "not to be realized because not to/ Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because/ Not to be realized" (VI). But those purities must be "imagined well," if he is to be content with his life as artist. They must "be visible or invisible,/ Invisible or visible or both." They must be specific or abstract, abstract or specific or both; they must be color and the idea within color, "The weather and the giant of the weather," "An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought." The abstraction, then, is the object apprehended sensuously, to which meaning is given by thought; it is also the generalization which is made meaningful and vital by the particular; finally it is re* velatlon humanistically conceived in art.

In the next poem (VII) Stevens speculates on living with ease, without being compelled to establish from the beginning "the giant,/

A thinker of the first idea." We can be happy without rigorous medi­ tations, with only a casual walk "around a lake." As we walk, we en­ gage in life as though we were effortlessly improvising each movement; occasionally we "stop to watch/ A definition growing certain and/Await within that certainty...." We pause, that is, for an Instant to attend rather than restrictive that leads us perhaps to expect a dramatic an­ nouncement of his goals, rather than the more modest and less ambitious definitions of an ars poetica. And in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of

Words" our expectations are fulfilled. Feeling death about him every­ where, he vriteB that we are trying to survive with some dignity; the loss of the beautiful and the good, the suspicions of the anti-poetic mind toward reality, scenes of monstrosity and violence in war— in sum, the pressures of reality" close in upon the contemplative mind either to snuff it out or so to stir it to violence that it becomes too in­ volved with events and loses its sense of its own distinction, as mind apart from events. We live in an age of disbelief, where there is noth­ ing beautiful to believe in. And no one seems to care; for only ugli-

O ness, death, pain are affirmed, and in the meantime "all the great things have been denied" (N.A., p. 17)-

The poet, Stevens asserts, tries to "help people lead their lives;" he alone can save man by affirming the Instinct for nobility which ex­ presses our desire to survive spiritually.

For the sensitive poet, conscious of negations, nothing is more difficult than the affirmations of nobility and yet there is nothing that he requires of himself more persistently, since in them and In their kind, alone, are to be found those sanctions that are the reasons for his being and for that occasional ecstasy or ecstatic freedom of the mind, which is his special privilege (N.A., p. 35)*

His task is severely complicated, Stevens goes on, because "There is no element more conspicuously absent from contemporary poetry than nobility.

What he means, of course,is that today there are no definitions, no forms of nobility. Nevertheless, nobility is alive as our most basic instinct 216

to the motions within the mind, and suddenly, effortlessly, Inexplic­

ably, miraculously "balances...happen,/ As a man and woman meet and

love forthwith." At moments we stand at the verge of consciousness,

"on the edge of sleep,/ As on an elevation, and behold" the abstraction

blooded, "The academies like structures In a mist."

But If we do not care to achieve these revelations so fortuitously,

then "Can we compose" them? "Can we compose a castle-fortress-home,/...

and set the MacCullough there as major man?" (VIII). Can we compose

heaven and set MacCullough there as man-God? He realizes this is quite

difficult to do, for he knows that "major man" is not any specific man.

Yet it is possible that MacCullough himself, the particular man, could

conceivably earn the right to share in the idea of the hero if he were

to "lay lounging by the sea,/"

Drowned in its washes, reading in the sound, About the thinker of the first idea, He might take habit, whether from wave or phrase,

Or power of the wave, or deepened speech, Or a leaner being, moving in on him, Of greater aptitude and apprehension (VIII).

An individual could by reflecting deeply, by trying to become part of

a larger imagination, take on the speech, clothes, and meaning of that

"leaner being, moving in on hlms" He could himself become metamorphosed

into God. That metamorphosis would not come through a manic assertion

of will or pride; rather it would come "As if the language suddenly, with ease,/ Said things it had laboriously spoken" (italics mine).

Man is made strong through "The romantic intoning, the declaimed

clairvoyance" (IX) of a superior being whom Stevens will not address as 217

God. Nevertheless, the "declaimed clairvoyance" suggests that it is a voice from beyond, uttering noble sounds of poetry which "are parts of apotheosis." Poetry, the power of nobility that transforms man into major man, and the romantic Intoning are Interchangeable: part of "a myth before the myth began,/ Venerable and articulate and complete•"

In words of praise which celebrate man metamorphosed into major man,

Stevens cries out:

He is and may be but oh! he is, he is, This foundling of the Infected past, so bright, So moving in the manner of his hand.

Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him No names. Dismiss him from your images. The hot of him is purest in the heart (IX).

Again, reiterating the theme articulated in Parts of a World, the essence of the hero, "major man," cannot be described in Imagesj in the last analysis, he resides only in "the heart's residuum."

"Major man" exists, as Stevens maintained in "Examination of a Hero in Time of War" as the common man, a ludicrous and tragic figure in "Us old coat,/ His slouching pantaloons, beyond the town" (X). He is look­ ing for "what was, where it used to be," for an image of himself, for his old dignity. He cannot find it. But Socrates instructs his ephebe

"to make, to confect/ The final elegance." He is not to console him, nor to sanctify him, since, of course, he has no need to be sanctified, perfected as he is already. He is "plainly to propound" the hero made heroic in his wounds, the man dressed as tramp in the tragi-comedy of life.

As we observe, then, in the first part of "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," the fall of man from Eden is enacted again and again by the poet who, bored with the celestial ennui of the pure first idea, plun­

ges earthward for green metaphors, for life. No sooner is he there, however, than he desires to be refreshed by the revelation of the first idea. At times, as we see in poem VII, paradise comes effortlessly,

casually; at times, as in poem VIII, man strives with all his power to arrive there, realizing in the end that he must mystically absorb part

of a power beyond him. Having achieved heroic stature, the hero is praised and exalted. Indeed, the possibility of the heroic in every man exists. But he cannot find it for himself. And therefore the poet must "confect/ The final elegance," must tell the common man what he himself is; the poet must be that unreal voice from beyond, the "roman­ tic intoning" prophesying that he, the tramp, is a hero, that he is

"major man," that without him the abstraction cannot be blooded. For while blooding the abstraction requires the mind to give It meaning, the meaning finally expresses the greatness of man, the expansive pow­ erful imagination in the mind of every man.

In the group of poems in the section entitled "It Must Change,"

Stevens finds himself thrust into the sensuous world. The meeting of abstraction and particular gives rise to dialectic, process, change.

In the first poem, he merely notes a list of things that keep recurring throughout time and changing ever so slightly. "The Italian girls wore jonquils in their hair/ And these the seraph saw, had seen long since,/

In the bandeaux of the mothers" (I). The degree of change is so minis­ cule that constancy and repetition give way to ennui. "It means the 219

distaste we feel for this withered scene/ Is that it has not changed

enough. It remains,/ It is a repetition.” He begins to desire what he does not have: a more perceivable transformation. The booming of the bees is blunt, and not, as he would wish it to be "broken in sub­ tleties." How can those subtleties be achieved? Each season has its quantity of bees and its quantity of booming. The reason perhaps is that nothing endures long enough to be refined and perfected. And there­ fore, in the following poem, unreallstlcally, ludicrously, "The President ordains the bee to be/ Immortal" (II).

But the President can ordain all he wants to, and still the bee ■ will remain at the end of its life an exhaustible being. 'Why should it in fact not be exhausted? Wouldn't it be absurd if it continued booming, like the love song of the middle-aged woman in "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," "past meridian?" One cannot at the end of one's life pretend that one is at the beginning. The booming must come, therefore, from the "newcome bee." But though ceaseless repetition is a bore, as a part of nature it cannot be destroyed. Nor can it be arrested, b b it has been in "The great statue of General Du Puy" (III), without seem­ ing false and ludicrous. But art projects an unnatural "suspension, a permanence, so rigid/ That it made the General a bit absurd." The absurdity is heightened as the statue turns out to be a mere "illustri­ ous ornament,/ As a setting for geraniums." For all that pompous show of immortality^ life seems to go on unchanged. Yet the people have ef­ fected one significant change: for "the General was rubbish in the end."

Having established the necessity of change (fixity is absurd and unrealistic, and ceaseless repetition tedious) Stevens attempts in the fourth poem to define change as resulting from the dialectic of oppo­ sites. The connoisseur of chaos observes that the mating of opposite things issues in many children, "cold copulars, embrace/ And forth the particulars of rapture come" (IV). Like lovers "Morning and after­ noon are clasped together" and "North and South are an Intrinsic couple."

This union produces new offspring and changes the souls of the parents partaking of each other, becoming one. Extending the pairs of lovers, he writes in revery and ecstasy combined: "The captain and his men/

Are one and the aailor and the sea are one./ Follow after, 0 my compan­ ion, my fellow, my self,/ Sister and solace, brother and delight." The change initiated in poem four is elevated into apotheosis that is part jaunty and part sublime. The first image is one of nature renewing it­ self "Long after the planter's death." Without the planter, everything seems to be falling into disrepair: "A few limes remained,/ Where his house had fallen three scraggy trees weighted/ With garbled green" (V).

But when he was alive, he imagined his paradise exotic, fertile, and ; sublime. "There was an island beyond him on which rested,

An island to the South, on which rested like A mountain, a pineapple pungent as Cuban summer.

And la-bas, la-bas, the cool bananas grew, Hung heavily on the great banana tree, Which pierces clouds and bends on half the world.

His extension of metaphor from one land to another is clumsy in its ser­ ies of "on which rested" clauses. But the planter is a simple man; he is not bothered by the fact that his syntax Is belabored and dull as long as the ideas and images are ripe, pleasing and imaginative. The 221 planter was a man who "thought often of the land from which he came,/

How that whole country was a melon, pint/ If seen rightly and yet a possible red." A man who had not "been moved by life and by his imagi­ nation would never have been capable of such thoughts. The motive for the metamorphosis of the soul resides within the soul itself, in the heart of the man who "died/ Sighing that he should leave the banjo's twang." That robust, fanciful imagination which imagines island upon island upon island, one more extravagant than the other, contrasts with the changeless intonations of the birds which tell each other: "Bethou me.” The heavenly fellowship between birds of a feather becomes tedious in its changeless repetition of the same tone: "There was such idiot minstrelsy.” Chirping incessantly they call to mind the absurd statue 4 of General Du Puy. But, Stevens promises with relief, ”It will end,” that changeless "heavenly gong" will finally come to an end.

It seems at this moment in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" that whatever is just a- degree too changeless is highly objectionable. Ste­ vens requires not merely motion— but change in a measurable degree that will give motion meaning. And for that it seems that one needs imagina­ tion, as he writes in the next three poems as well as in the last poem of this section, a vigorous assertion of will within nature. Endless repeti­ tion without change is just as dreary as arrested action in life; and both are as Impossible as stark nakedness, or as the state of being ab­ stract, which in "Notes...” is not the ideal goal it is in "Examination cf a Hero..." and in many of the poems in Auroras of Autumn and The Rock. 222

Nanzia Nunzio tries to tell Ozymandias, in the most charming and de­

lightful poem in this collection, that she has prepared herself for a

long time to become his spouse by casting aside all the veils of arti­

fice, of imperfection:

I am the woman stripped more nakedly Than nakedness, standing before an inflexible Order, saying I am the contemplated spouse (VIII).

How absurd to claim she is a "contemplated spouse." How can a man

think of meditation at all when a woman stands before him demanding that

he acknowledge what his eyes instantaneously Inform him of: that she is

naked. Again and again she says: I am pure, I am honest, I am naked,

"precious for your perfecting." But Ozymandias is not as stupid as she

thinks he is, for he tells her that: "the spouse, the bride/ Is never

naked. A fictlve covering/ Weaves always glistening from the heart and

mind."

Nanzio Nunzio cannot express the sublime, the purity of the essence

of the wartime hero, for an impure fictive covering is woven in her mind.

The imperfect then manifests our life and humanity. We cannot do with­

out it. What a bore Nanzio Nunzio would be were she as pure as she

claims to be. Stevens seems to concede then that the Imperfect is our

paradise. Unlike the pure, the diamond essence of the hero which cannot

change because it is perfect and unhuman, all living things are suscep­

tible to change. Change, as in the unpredictable rhythm of life, never

takes a specified direction: from the grossly imperfect systematically

to the unimpeachably divine. Bather, as Stevens writes in poem IX,

"The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to/ The gibberish of the vul- 223

gate and back again.” The fiction itself is not constantly moving in

the direction of greater purity. Rather it becomes impure (real) at

times and, at other moments, pure (unreal) and thereupon resolvao into

different configurations of impurities and purities. Although the fic-

tive covering may be imperfect, Nanzio Nunzio has "confected it" into

the "ultimate elgance." This is precisely what the poet does to lan­

guage when he elevates the popular idiom of the common man "by a pecu­

liar speech to speak/ The peculiar potency of the general" (IX).

The fusion of the "gibberish of the vulgate," the poet's peculiar

gibberish, and the "peculiar potency" of the voice Intoning from beyond

takes place in poem X. At times each voice loses its identity in the

whole; at times each establishes its unique identity in relation to the

other. There is never open warfare among them; rather, one voice seems

to beckon the other in an endless point-counterpoint. "There was a will

to change,.../ The eye of a vagabond in metaphor/ That catches our own."

This flirtation between the language of two orders of reality is not a

casual affair. Indeed, "The casual is not/ Enough." Rather, the gib­ berish of the vulgate and the peculiar potency of the poetic "are clasp­

ed together” like "an intrinsic couple" (p. 392), so that "The partaker partakes of that which changes him," and both experience the "freshness

of the world." In response to it, we experience strength, exhilaration, excitation, pure power, as though we were beginning to live life anew, as though we had been immersed in the fountain of youth.

In the group of poems entitled "It must change," Stevens raises several provocative questions that are taken up in the poems Included in the section "It must give pleasure.” By what emotions and perceptions is change Ideally to he registered? Are there certain transformations that are unpleasant and therefore objectionable? What are the limits beyond which change cannot occur without destroying life? In the first poem in this group, Stevens objects to the "facile exercise" of the par­ ade, which stirs people to false exultations, "To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne, on/ The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart/

That is the common." That booming enthusiasm is, for him, too easy to achieve. For the highest, most sublime pleasure, one desires intensely minute gradations of change "to catch from that/ Irrational moment its unreasoning,/ As when the snn comes rising." To perceive the sun ris­ ing is surely not an entirely new experience. "These are not things transformed." Yet some change has occurred because sensitized to beau­ tiful and delicate nuances, "we (ourselves) are shaken by them as if they were." One is stirred by what he supposed would be only common­ place perceptions. Our emotions elude our understanding. We are a- mazed by our own capacity to feel deeply, and therefore "We reason a- bout them with a later reason."

To take pleasure in the big booming parade requires the sensibility of a peanut people. But nothing is more lethal than the unreal trans­ formations of the "Blue woman" bedecked and artificial with a soul like a blue-white diamond (II). She stands by her window, not desiring the vibrant life outside to "strengthen her abortive dreams with natural forms." Rather, "It was enough/ For her that she remembered" the forms in which she desired to see life outside the window. She is afraid of 225

too much heat, passion, love, ripeness. She cannot stand the "sexual

blossoms" unless they "should repose" vith "their fierce addictions."

For her passion and sex must be cooled and aborted, artificially ter­

minated, shut off, contained, Instead of being released outward, or

being received by her from without. Therefore, "the argentines" "cool

their ruddy pulses." "The frothy clouds/ Are nothing but frothy clouds

for her they do not foam; they do not become "foamy waves," moving to­

ward her, inundating her with life and passion. "The frothy blooms"

in her imagination "Waste without puberty"— unnatural, as though they

never had any life. The woman at her window names all the things as

she wants to see them: "cold and clear,/ Cold, coldly delineating."

But her eye, which Intrudes upon her mind, objects. The eye, after all,

sees what exists in front of it. But because vision comes through a fusion of eye and spirit, because with her the spirit is false, laughs at what the eye seep^ her sense of the vorld is twisted, grotesquely artificial.

What she sees is not a world that is transparent, cold, frigid, nor, on the other hand, life-giving and green. Bather, it is a macabre image of the natural world: frozen, hideous as a statue, painted blue-white and the blooded reality of nature.

A lasting visage in a lasting bush, A face of stone in an unending red, Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate (ill).

The fixity becomes death-bearing, monstrous:

The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips, Ohe frown like serpents basking on the brow, The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself. 17

and can be expressed "as a force and not the manifestations of which it

is composed, which are never the same." Because, as far as Stevens him­

self is concerned, there are no definitions (forms, manifestations) of

the principle of nobility, one cannot speak with an air of certitude.

And yet, as he maintains repeatedly, the direction of his thought is to

achieve definition, truth, and form which, for the moment, he is only in

the process of arriving at. Indeed, he is driven to create and discover

forms by a "suasion not to be denied." For he is summoned by the neces*-

sary angel, his divine double, who cries out for nobility, our most ba­

sic instinct for life and beauty.

If the goal for the artist is to affirm nobility in an age which

has failed to create any noble image of itself, then how might he come

upon a means of expressing it? For Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Yeats,

the major figures in contemporary Anglo-American poetry, it was myth and the past that provided archetypes and values for judging the present and predicting the future. Stevens, however, cut himself radically from the forms the past provided. The forms, he insisted, had to be contemporary.

More Important, he refused to be rushed into committing himself prema­ turely to certain forms he might wish to sanction as worthy of manifesting nobility. The journey toward definition and form, therefore, was at times a tedious affair, at times a pleasant leisurely revery, at times a desper­ ate plunging into the future. There are moments, for example, when Ste­ vens seems to suggest that drifting toward definition is a pleasant pastime and that, indeed, there is no reason why one should desire to do anything other than simply journey forever toward truths: "It is as if the painter 226

Her vision, Stevens writes mockingly, is "a little rusty" even while

still weirdly alive, with nature veering from under the lacquered sur:—

face, "a little rouged." Her memory is "an effulgence faded, dull cor­

nelian/ Too venerably used." She takes her sense of artifice, her self,

too seriously, constraining nature to live under that austere changeless

form. But she cannot destroy nature without earning a severe punishment.

As though some force rebells against her, "A dead shepherd brought tre­

mendous chords from hell." And a voice intoning from another world "bade

the sheep carouse," bade life once again into that world made hypesthe-

tic through the lady's vision. In this revitalized scene children,not

afraid of love, "brought early flowers/ And scattered them about."

The fusion of the real and the romantic is achieved in the mystic

marriage ceremony in Catawba in poem IV. The couple refuse to wed ac­

cording to religious law. For religion prescribes in advance the Ideals

according to which they must live. "Each must the other take not for

his high,/ His puissant front gor for her subtle sound,/ The sho-shoo-

shoo of secret cymbals round." For them the real reason that Joins

them is that each is a "sign/ To stop the whirlwind, balk the elements."

They are bride and groom 'not in heaven, but on earth. "They married well

because the marriage-place/ Was what they loved. It was neither heaven

nor hell." Had they married in heaven, perhaps they too would have been

assaulted by the "tremendous chords from hell" of the "dead shepherd"

to awaken them to a life that muBt be lived on earth.

An unreal atmosphere of heaven and the artificial world of the

blue woman are Just as dehumanizing as a world in which ecstasy is made

/ "sensible,” modest, repressed, ordered, confined. "The Canon Aspirin" boasts about "his sister, in vhat sensible ecstasy/ She lived in her house" (V). She believes that everything she does is appropriate, rigid, simple. She austerely rejects any daydreams. But vhen she puts her children to bed, she prays that they dream as free spirits, liberated from all her daily restraints, those normal, dull, rigors according to vhich she regulates both her soul and theirs. But in the night, vhen the "Canon came to sleep," there arose in spite of all his love of or­ der and rule "Once more night's pale Illuminations, gold/ Beneath, far underneath, the surface of / H1b eye" (VI). He became avare of "a point" to vhich he flev at night "vith huge pathetic force." Beyond that point he could not progress as thought, as "sensible ecstasy." And, thereupon he had, as Stevens vrote, "to choose," to made a decision, "to Include the things/ That in each other are included," to include vhat he had re­ jected during the day: "the vhole,/ The complicate, the amassing harmony’.'

To progress beyond thought to a greater harmony is not to impose order— as by building "statues of reasonable men,/ Who surpassed the most literate ovl, the most erudite/ Of elephants" (VII). Bather, the finest, life-giving order exists already created vithin nature, there to be discovered, "an order as of/ A season, to discover summer and knov it." He is inspired by the beauty of knoving such order, and vonders vhether it is possible to discover it. "It is possible, possible, pos­ sible. It must/ Be possible." To find that order for him vould be "To find the real,/ To be stripped of every fiction except one,/ The fiction of an absolute— ". That is the best reality that man can possibly dis- 228 cover. And so he tells the angel abstracted from nature to "Be silent in your luminous cloud and hear/ The luminous melody of proper sound."

But In addressing the angel> he begins to wonder: vhat Is the angel itself? Is It something that exists by itself? Or Is it indeed part of himself? He comes to believe that if the angel "Leaps downward through evening's revelations" (VIII), then the experience of that down­ ward flight may belong to the angel; but if he himself shares the exper­ ience, then can he not say that he and the angel are one? The flight upward and the descent, the spirit soaring upward to the "naked point" and the angel humanized swooping downward to him: this is "expressible bliss," the contentment of revelation. He believes that if he can feel this for an hour, then "there is a day,/ There is a month, a year, there is a time," there is forever "In which majesty is a mirror of the self," when he can see himself as a part of the immaculate beginning. For him the real flight is not necessary. The imagined one will do. Like Cin­ derella , he can fulfill "himself beneath the roof." Poor ephebe in poem

V of the first section of "Notes..,” vho strove in anguish to look be­ yond the roofs for a vision of heaven, can achieve an imaginative ful­ fillment in heaven without being bodily transported there.

Having progressed beyond the booming exultation of false parades, the unreal hardened change of the blue woman, the unreality of a wedding in heaven and the sensible ecstasy, Stevens veers away from the unreal, artificial, excessive, and melodramatic transformations. He now calls repetition "A thing final in itself, and, therdbre, good" (IX). It is final-- perfect in a sense precisely because it lacks conscious purpose, 229 desiccating rationales. Parallels of sounds "blending remain in themselves unchanging. In this poem, therefore, he seems to qualify a tentative conclusion made in "It must change," namely, that there must be appreci­ able change in order to give meaning to motion. Nov it seems that any assertion of life is pleasant, and that too much change is unreal and unpleasant. With some hesitation he vrites: "Perhaps, the man-hero is not the exceptional monster,/ But he that of repetition is most master."

But in the final poem in this group, as though bored vith the tedium of repetition and frightened at the implications of changelessness in motion, Stevens addresses the earth, constantly observing differences in her bearing. He notes that she is never one thing for too long a time and that he cannot, therefore, fix and define her being. He knows her and yet does not. "You are familiar yet an aberration." He desires to know her, to possess her: he is driven by "unprovoked sensations" which "requires/ That I should name you flatly, waste no words,/ Check your evasions, hold you to yourself." But he cannot do that so easily, so brutally; he cannot subjugate her. For he loves her.

Even so when I think of you as strong or tired,

Bent over work, anxious, content, alone, You remain the more than natural figure. You Become the soft-footed phantom, the irrational

Distortion, however fragrant, however dear. That's it: the more than rational distortion, The fiction that results from feeling (X).

Instead of fixing her, destroying her, he pauses out of feeling and respect, and from his love grows a sense of her: warm, tired, strong, soft, fragrant— all of which is the poetic fiction of her. "Flicked 230 by feeling,” he will one day address her by name. Then she will still

continue to move, to be alive, but now be transported along with him

into a pure and radiant atmosphere, ”in crystal.”

Paradise humanistically conceived has been defined in terms of the

requisites of abstraction, change, and pleasure. The degree and purpose

of change, as we have seen, is determined according to what gives human beings, who live in the world, enjoy it sensuously, sensually, in medi­ tation and revery, the most Intense and immaculate pleasure. Non-human knowledge of paradise by human beings is revelation. But revelation can­ not be expressed in words. Therefore, the supreme fiction is revelation humanistically expressed by the poet, intoning from distances, from the divine. He chants the sadness and glory of the soldier in time of war.

For the soldier is the one who must fight the war ’’between the mind/ And sky.” But the poet, by patching ”the moon together in his room/ To his

. Virgilian cadences," achieves the armistice.

The soldier is poor without the poet's lines,

His petty syllabi, the sounds that stick, Inevitably modulating, in the blood.

The soldier sacrifices himself gladly for the armistice. He strips him­ self of all his gross fictions, of his Inferior language, for the nobil­ ity and elegance of the "ultimate poem.”

The apollonian serenity achieved in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" is short-lived. For the optimistic view of being imaged there in the i- dealized form of man is ravaged by an assault of doubt and despair in

"Esthetique du Mai.” The "impossible possible glass man,” no longer be­ lievable to Stevens, is shattered in a thousand pieces and swept up in a 231

"horde of destructions." The Socratic figure who instantaneously achieves

a perception of the "inconceivable idea of the sun" at the beginning of

"Notes..," is replaced by the men of "Esthetique du Mai" who never achieve

any genuine understanding of themselves and of the absolute. Their minds

are governed only by petty wishes, fears, compulsions, wild aspirations.

These are the men, the real and not ideal human beings, whom Stevens must

know in crder to understand man as he is and not as the sublime fiction

confected by the poet. For with an understanding of things as they are,

he might hope to write the ultimate poem, purified of all romantic illu­

sions.

Stevens comes to realize that one's knowledge of being can be falsi­

fied not only by conceiving of God in the image of man, but also by con­

ceiving of man in the ideal image of God. In "The Kan with the Blue Gui­

tar," he brought together for the first time the antagonists of the real and the ideal. In "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" and "Examination of a Hero in Time of War," he sought to resolve good and

evil, but found that all he could affirm in the end was an either-or view of life: either earth or heaven, but not both. He could conceive either that man is imperfect and destined to die on earth, or that man can sur­ vive only when he is perfected into a non-human essence, into an abstrac­ tion. With the first view, artlls possible, but only in the degraded forms of artifice, illusion, or delusion; with the second view, art is neither possible, nor relevant. Stevens' goal was to create art that would be pure and real at the same time, and by means of such art to achieve on earth a genuine vision of the paradise in which man would 232 dwell after death. He felt compelled to repudiate all art unless it could satisfy the most austere and ambitious demands: that it guarantee man's survival beyond death, immortality, then, came to be for Stevens the absolute, the highest good in the universe.

Stevens believed that man's basic instinct for nobility drives him to strive for that good, although every man has a different idea of what the absolute is. Indeed, everyone in "Esthetique du Mai" is motivated by the desire to abstract good from evil (the perfect from the imperfect).

But the sad lesson to be learned from this poem is that although all of these men believe that they have arrived at some notion of abstraction

(of good), all they have really seen is evil masquerading as good, evil glazed over romantically by rationalization and artifice, made therefore not only endurable, but at times even palatable. All of the tragic and vain attempts of these men to arrive at pure good, Stevens observes, are doomed to fall. "Esthetique du Mai" therefore argues for the annihila­ tion of art on the grounds that man's vision is inherently evil. But even with such knowledge, Stevens continued to hope that he would!create a work of art unimpeachably divine. For to the end of his career, al­ though all of his speculations led him to repudiate art, he sever ceased to believe beyond belief that he would one day create the ultimate poem which would promise genuine and not illusory fulfillment.

"Through a glass, darkly"

The world of "Esthetique du Mai" is peopled by real men, all of them malcontents and failures. But there is one way of distinguishing

the failures of some from those of others: some "conclude fadedly,"

while others are magnificent failures. In the first group is the ele­

gant connoisseur of life who insulates himself from the thought of pain

and death and defines reality as a benevolent force in the universe.

Artifice, ignorance, and fear stand between himself and experience. S e ­

cond, there is the man of passion who in his desire to experience life

is never tormented by the thought of suffering and death. His only pain

comes from his dissatisfaction with limited, with merely human achieve­

ments. Stevens believed that one must medltatee suffering and death—

the evil that for human beings is integral with the good— and sadly,

wisely, like the soldier in "Examination of a Hero in Time of War," sac­

rifice oneself for a noble and pure ideal. For suffering and death a-

lone are the means of achieving art, as abstraction, that is, art puri­

fied of illusion. In "Esthetique du Mai" the only abstractions praised by Stevens are the rose wound of the soldier and the paradisal existence

of non-human beings. But as for all the aspiring artists of "Esthetique

du Mai" who would fulfill themselves and at the same time insist upon living as human beings, they are destined to be failures.

Apparently on vacation at Naples, the elegant connoisseur of life writes "letters home/ And between his letters" reads "paragraphs/ On the sublime"— paragraphs that perhaps he himself has written. His read­ ing and writing of words, words, wordsiis about as close to the sublime as he can get. Vesuvius rumbles, and he notes that it groans because it feels pain. But he himself feels nothing, except a mild pleasure "to 23b

be sitting there," insulated from chaos and pain, and enjoying them at

a distance* The flashes of burning rock and light make beautiful colors

"in the glass." Evil is aesthetically pleasing, and he saviors it through

"the sultriest fulgurations, flickering" and "the terror of sound." Try­

ing to add :another sentence or two to what he has written, he speculates

on the nature of pain. He thinks he can know it by listening to the vol­

cano rumbling in the distance. In the end he is forced to try "to remem­

ber the phrases written down again and again in all the books he has

read. But he cannot even recollect them coherently. He begins to des­

cribe pain as a quality detached from any being. The phrases are convo­

luted, as his mind strives to grapple with truths beyond his comprehen­

sion:

pain Audible at noon, pain torturing itself, Fain killing pain on the very point of pain (C.P., p. 31*0. The argument is circular: pain reverts back to itself— "Like hunger

that feeds on its own hungriness" (p. 323)— rather than plunging be­

yond itself to relate with something other. These meditations by the man at Naples are put in their proper perspective by two remarks made calmly by Stevens as omniscient narrator: "The volcano trembled in another ether,/ As the body trembles at the end of life." The volcano quakes "in another ether," in a reality beyond man's comprehension, as the body itself is convulsed "at the end of life," in another "ether,"

(reality) beyond the comprehension of the connoisseur of Vesuvius.

Meanwhile, the man at Naples is surrounded by some delicate com­ forts which make him feel that the pleasure and ease of the moment will continue indefinitely. "It was almost time for lunch." At this moment,

Stevens as omniscient narrator, makes a statement that the connoisseur

of pain is not capable of: "Pain is human." In these three words,

Stevens has defined pain more accurately than has the thinker on the

sublime, for all of his tortured phrases. The austere simplicity and

directness of that statement reveal a mind essentially untroubled, un­

afraid of the truth of pain and death. The man who vacations in Naples,

however, is afraid of confronting such knowledge, which, somewhere in

the deep recesses of his mind, he might really possess. He has no con­

scious comprehension of the sublime, even though "His book/ Made sure

of the most correct catastrophe." Perhaps he is trying to explain the

eruption of Vesuvius as a punishment for human depravity. If so, then

in the comment that follows, Stevens, with the most serene irony, re­ veals why such attempts are absurd and are bound to issue in phrases more tortured and twisted than the earlier rhetorical juggling of pain.

Except for us, Vesuvius might consume In solid fire the utmost earth and know No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up To die.) (p. 31*0.

Vesuvius feels no pain at all. Were it not for man living in the world, the earth might a million times "consume in solid fire" and feel nothing at all. It would be comforting to think that fearing pain, nature would try to keep from destroying Itself and us along with it, that Vesuvius, for fear of suffering, would keep from erupting. To attribute pain, forebearance, mercy to nature is absurd, unrealistic. But this fact "... is part of the sublime/ From which we shrink."

Vesuvius feels nothing. "Except for us,/ The total past felt nothing 18 carried on with himself a continual argument as to whether what delights

us in the excercise of the mind is what we produce or whether it is the exercise of a power of the mind" (N.A., pp. 149-150)*

But these pleasures are overridden by an emphatic declaration a- galnst either remaining in one place for too long a time or meandering without direction from one aimless, passionless pursuit to another. Al­ though he was unwilling therefore, to define them rigorously for fear of suggesting to himself that he was at the end, rather than at the be­ ginning, of the Journey toward definition, nevertheless he had a general sense of his own tastes and a faith that his questioning would lead him to some final forms and definitions. Above all, he writes, a man must have a sense of what he is after, a sense which guards him against making new and sporadic beginnings:

Personally I have a distaste for miscellany...Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistlc, or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and the process of adjustment is a world of flux, as it should be for the poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. 3

He is constantly striving to satisfy the mind by proposing and rejecting possible definitions until he arrives at a definition (a form) that will express precisely what he wishes to say. At times desiring to believe in, to affirm a form (a definition) that the imagination has enthusias­ tically postulated without the sanction of reason, he conceives of rea­ son and the Imagination as being at loggerheads. But, in his essays at least, he has accommodated himself to his special predicament: that his is an unending meditation, an unending search for definition, for form.

3 See William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell (Boston, 1920)* pp. 17-18. when destroyed." Unlike human beings, nature is not governed by the pleasure principle, the instinct for self-preservation. It can be destroyed and feel nothing. For nature there is no difference whatsoever between being and nothingness, as far as its own ability to understand and feel that difference is concerned. Nature exists in a world beyond pleasure and pain, in a world beyond mind, will, desire. Events take place with no htimanly conceivable design in mind. For nature cannot even feel or know what is happening to it. The man at Naples, who does not realize that "pain is human" attributes pain to nature and depends upon it for mercy and protection. Nature is his parent, who gladly suf­ fers to spare him the blows he is entitled to have. And in the meantime, nonchalantly he prepares for a leisurely lunch and for afternoon relax­ ation. Nature comes to be the Intercessor between himself and experience, the precise point where he and "something other" join. The "something other," of course, is part of himself that he has rejected: namely, pain.

He has forfeited his human qualities to become indifferent, like nature; and in the meantime, he has endowed Vesuvius with great feeling and com­ passion. His only unsettling emotion now is a nostalgia for a kind of experience denied him, a kind of life which he cannot even specify, some­ thing he rejected long ago. The thing denied by him was the possibility of a life he might have enjoyed, one rich with pleasure, pain, with hu­ manity. The vague intimation of that possible life comes back to him at times— like thoughts of home while on vacation. Writing letters to his family, he begins speculating about the sublime. But his speculations gone awry from the beginning, the possibilities of experiencing the su­ blime recede far into the distance. At night, however, he is not free from troubling dreams,

Warbllngs... Too dark, too far, too much the accents of Afflicted sleep, too much the syllables That would form themselves, in time, and communicate The intelligence of his despair, express What meditation never quite achieved.

His dim awareness of his own despair, drowned during the day, emerges closer to the surface in thoughts, not of the conscious mind, which chisles "the most correct catastrophe," but of the unconscious mind.

But now the feelings denied expression during the day evade his under­ standing, which can find no words to express them. He is not yet aware that he has tried to forget pain and death. All he can sense is that the moon and night are rising above his meditations. Instead of being close to him as comforting companions might be, his thought, the dark warbllngs, the moon: ail are now "part of a supremacy always/ Above him

...always free from him,/ As night was free from him." The feeling that something is superior to and different from him touches him just as "the shadow" of night "touched / Or merely seemed to touch him,..." He has no certain knowledge; he is not himself completely, but neither is he the "no man” he was during the day. Instead of trying to remember phra­ ses not his own and living vicariously through "something other," now

"he spoke/ A kind of elegy he found in space."

In his nocturnal elegy he is still not capable of the austere statement: "Fain is human." Indeed, his meditations are more twisted and difficult to understand than ever. The forces of repression (re­ jection) are still at work; but they are no longer able to reject the truth altogether. All they can do is to disguise it so that the connois­ seur of truth cannot directly apprehend it. In his conscious daytime meditation he had defined pain as being unrelated to anything other than itself. Nov, in the night, he still cannot get himself to say that pain is human. But he no longer sees pain as a dry concept detached from any­ thing else. Rather it nov exists in the "scent" of the acacias, "in the air still hanging heavily." Furthermore, through the process of symbol­ ic logic in the dream, pain, personified, stands at the center of his dream-like convoluted elegy that obscurely, darkly discloses a truth a* bout the relation betveen himself and pain. Fain, then, is the osten­ sible subject of the meditation; while he, the ego, cast as the central figure in the dream, is the latent subject of the elegy. Put concisely, the unconscious has achieved the Identity between humanity and pain that conscious meditation strove to corrode.

Fain (he) "does not regard/ This freedom, this supremacy." That is, he does not realize that man, willing to endure pain, becomes su­ perior (perfected). "In/ Its (pain's, his) own hallucination" it (he)

"never sees" how "that which rejects it saves it in the end." In his own madness, man never realizes how the conscious mind which rejects pain

(represses, casts it away), in the end is destined to accept it. She moment he accepts the burden of suffering, man purifies his own mind of delusion. The man at Vesuvius cannot recognize these truths; others wise the anonymity of the pronouns "it" and "that" would be dispelled.

Definition, clarity, and truth are precisely what the man at Naples can­ not achieve. Unlike the tortured daytime exercises, then, the dream­ like elegy does express a vague intimation of the truth. But, for Stevens, 239

to be Instantaneously apprehended, truth requires an austere statement

that is "exquisite In poverty."

In the stanzas which follow the tortured elegy, Stevens comments

Ironically on the melodramatic efforts of the man at Naples to achieve

a direct, simple understanding of pain:

His firm stanzas hang like hives in hell Or what hell was, since now both heaven and hell Are one, and here, 0 terra Infidel (p. 315).

Hell, a powerful evil, pain that is alive, diluted by thoughts of heaven,

exists now on earth. Blurred by good, evil and pain cannot be strongly

experienced. Hell has been destroyed by "an over-human god," humanized

(and therefore falsified) like nature, as though it could bear all the

burden of our pain. "We cry," Stevens writes with gentle irritation and

amusement, "Because we suffer,"— suffer, of course, not like adults,

but like children whimpering for "our oldest parent, peer/ Of the popu­

lace of the heart, the reddest lord." His pity has enfeebled us.

If only he would not pity us so much, Weaken our fate, relieve us of woe both great And small, a constant fellow of destiny,

A too, too human god, self-pity's kind And uncourageous genesis....

Since he "has gone before us in experience," and Instructs us on all

there is to know about life (since, that is, he comes between us and ex­ perience), ours is an "uncourageous genesis." If only god were not so

kind, so benevolent. Why, after all, do we need so much help when "...

It seems/ As if the health of the world might be enough"? "The honey

of common summer/ Might be enough" to sustain us. We should be strong

enough to bear our pain nobly, Instead of projecting it as "satanic 2kO mimicry" in mawkish elegieB, or of imputing it to Vesuvius. Then, sure­ ly, we could find our way from the artificial preciousness and calm which drowns "the intelligence of despair" to a strong and passionate experience of pleasure and pain, of the sublime. We must know, there­ fore, that what is humanly real and what exists beyond constitute two different orders of reality. And nothing can give us that knowledge except our own direct experience of it.

But a benevolent god comes between ourselves and experience. The man who sees life through this god's eyes invariably writes a book ”de

Toutes Sortes de Fleurs" with nature, and not himself, as authority.

Surrounded by all sorts of flowers, by multitudes that kill the single genuine thought, he is not a man of strong feeling. Bather, he is "the sentimentalist." But a man who creates something authentic plays music whose sounds, unlike the rustle of many paper roses, assert again and again that he is the maker. He seemB, then, to "play only one" sound

"In an ecstasy of its associates," the single sound he loves. He does not release tones casually, forgetting them soon after they have been sounded. Bather, in repeating— or seeming to repeat— only one note, he implies that he desires to have it for his own and never to part with it. He is consumed with the desire to create and then to possess what he has created. In his intensity and passion he is like

that Spaniard of the rose, Itself Hot-hooded and dark-blooded, (who) rescued the rose From nature, each time he saw it, making it As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye (p. 316).

The sentimentalist would probably be content to indulge himself in

"toutes sortes de fleurs." But Stevens would like to believe that the 2kl man of great passion is fulfilled in loving a single rose. Indeed, in his unwillingness to forgo belief in the ideal Don Juan, Stevens says that it is impossible to conceive of him squandering his passion upon

"barefoot philandering." But, having asked the question-- "Can ve con­ ceive of him as rescuing less...?"— Stevens pauses, and, the illusion of the ideal sustained momentarily gives way to a vision of the real

Don Juan, the philanderer, "The gexfcs of misfortune":

That evil, that evil in the self, from which In desperate hallow, rugged gesture, fault Falls out on everything: the genius of The mind, which is our being, wrong and wrong, The genius of the body, which is our world, Spent in the false engagements of the mind.

In the following stanza Stevens bids that "all true sympathizers" of genius gather. Passion is purified of all evil without deteriora­ ting into flimsy sentimentality, as one foregoes "barefoot philandering" for the liakedtdt passion," where each person rescues a single rose, a single loved one, and makes it "As he saw it, exist in his own especial eye."

So great a unity, that it is bliss, Ties us to those we love. For this familiar, This brother even in the father's eye, This brother half-spoken in the mother's throat And these regalia, these things disclosed, These nebulous brilliancies in the smallest look Of the being's deepest darling (p. 317).

For the intensity and fulfillment of the private experience, one must willingly

forego Lament, willingly forfeit the ai-ai Of parades in the obscurer selvages.

One must give up all artifice and public show, exhibited even "in the 2k2

obscurer selvages." Naked and pure, one Is to stand at the center of

one's own life where both the eye and the spirit participate vith equal

intensity:

Be near me, come closer, touch my hand, phrases Compounded of dear relation, spoken twice, Once by the lips, once by the services Of central sense (p. 317)*

Thla intensely passionate and private experience is more important

"Than clouds, benevolences, distant heads," than anything beyond the

present moment, any authority and anyone beyond oneself. This single

private passion between the self and "something other" Is "Exquisite in

poverty." In its austerity, Its limitation to a private experience, pas­

sion becomes beautiful. In restricting oneself to a few intensely felt

experiences, one retains those human "attributes/ With which we vested,

once, the golden forms" of the sun, of nature, of everything beyond us.

In-decorating at one time those "golden forms" with "damasked memory,"

we did not project (that is, lose) any humanity because, at that -time,

we were not even human. We were unreal in the paradise of innocence,

of lntenseat communion. But how our humanity must be contained within

ourselves, lest it be dissipated and lost to us forever.

The theme of genius gone away is expressed in the parable of the

sun (VI). The sun, himself a genius, a golden form, enjoys a supremely

perfect existence. "He dwells/ In a consummate prime." Yet he too has

limitations. For though he "brings the day to perfection," he "fails"

at the end of the day. He is pained by this flaw and "still desires/

A further consummation." He wishes to be in his prime both day and

night. Like Don Juan, he is not content with limited conquests. Bather, he must have hoth daytime and nighttime ecstasies. And so, "For the lunar month," he "makes the tenderest research, intent/ On a trans­ mutation," on a further consummation, "which, when it happens, turns out to be askew." He exhausts himself "And space is filled with his/

Rejected years." Instead of his being the one to seize life with a passion, he himself lies inert, depleted, while another devours him. r "A big bird pecks at him/ For food. The big bird's bony appetite/ Is as insatiable as the sun's." The bird, which "rose from an Imperfection of its own/ To feed on the yellow bloom.••," is like the vulture, de­ vouring Prometheus. Through the divine sustenance of the sun, the bird itself is partly purified. "Its grossest appetite bee canes less gross."

And its food, purified also, comes at times to be "Its divinations of serene/ Indulgence out of all celestial sight" (p. 318).

Attached so deeply to the sun, the bird retains the sun in its

"especial eye." "The sun is the country wherever he is." Were the sun to be darkened forever, the bird itself would cease to exist. But it cannot tolerate the finest state the sun can offer, for it was never the sun's equal. It "downwardly revolves/ Disdaining each astringent ripen­ ing,/ Evading the point of redness." It cannot bear the highest consum­ mation of "serene / Indulgence," the poverty and exquisite ripening in

"Red." Yet it is no longer "...content/ To repose in an hour.../ Of the country colors crowding against it." It desires the yellow that is be­ tween the country colors and the astringent ripening of red. It re­ quires a mid-point between the imperfect and the perfect. It cannot, therefore, be satisfied with the country colors, because the yellow grass- man's mind," the sun'a mind, which is "still immense," in spite of the 2kk

"■transmutations" gone awry, "Still promises perfections." Enthralled

by the possibility of being perfected, the bird aspires as far as it

can go, but, unable to tolerate "the point of redness," it "casts

away" the perfections offered to it.

The final words of part VI echo the final lines of part II: "and

in/ Its own hallucination never sees/ How that which rejects it saves

it in the end." It is the theme of rejection— of denying the possi­

bility of perfection, of dissipating one's own powers— that is central

in this poem. Being rejected, the sunijenses more sharpiy.vthan ever how

inferior his tragic freedom is to his austere limitation, which reward­

ed him with bounteous pleasures. Yet in the very process of destroying

himself, he has extended himself to those creatures that, but for his

wanton generosity, would be unredeemed, unloved. Unequal to the sun,

the bird does not know how to honor him. Even so, it cannot live with­

out him. In devouring him, it rejects through its grossness the purity

he has to offer, even though in the end, it is destined to be saved by

what it had once rejected.

The highest purity— the red rose rescued by the Spaniard and the

"point of redness" evaded: by both the bird and the sun squandering its

energy to become a clownish yellow— becomes in part VII, the red rose

of the soldier's wound. The sublime purity of evil genius and war is

redeemed by that emblem of suffering, perfection, and intense feeling.

"How red the rose that is the soldier's wound." How sublime is the pain that is the soldier's wound. The wound is the noble element in nature he now abstracts. It is more "blooded," vital, and alive than the 2Jf5 unhuman diamond essence of the hero that suggests nothing of the body and little of the soul* Stevens elevates the rose wound of the soldier by compounding the numbers of wounds: "The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all/ The soldiers that have fallen red in blood." He paints a landscape where nothing else can be seen except wounds made painless and perfected in the image of the rose. The wound itself becomes the miracle: the intersection of the temporal by the eternal, the sensuous manifestation of the divine, "The soldier of time grown deathless in great size," the intercessor between man and the beyond.

From that noble particular in reall$jr, Stevens establishes the an­ alogy between the real, visible, tangible and the unreal, the invisible ] and the pure. Step by step abstraction takes one away from the stark pain of the visible wound, as though he were assessing its significance in the universal'scheme which embraces everything human and everything beyond. The wounds form into "A mountain in which no ease is ever found,/

Unless indifference to deeper death is ease." The mountain becomes a

"shadow hill,” which in turn becomes "Circles of shadows, motionless/... yet moving" about the common center, the single wound— Imaginatively multiplied into thousands and thousands of wounds. Thereupon the circles of shadows form into "The shadows of his fellows,"— those who are dead and those who are still alive. Life and death are sublimely joined.

The soldier and all of his fellows who have fallen are deathless; for they are alive in the memory of those who mourn their death. The Soldier endures in the memory of the woman, in her "especial eye." He feels the touch of her beyond death. For, as she "smoothes her forehead with her 246 hand/...the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke."

Evil, when defined as suffering and death, is the ideal condition man must experience in order to perfect himself into a non-human ab­ straction. Evil as suffering is also the real, the unavoidable condi­ tion of living. Unable to tolerate pain, ve thought ve could repudiate it by denying Satan. But, in the end, ve destroyed only our means of apprehending it. Our fbrtnal understanding of pain in the myth of Shban has become a thing of the past; nevertheless, ve continue to experience evil as a very real force. All the vhile the intellect Insists that our ovn suffering is unreal. It is therefore the mind that is guilty of refusing to believe iriiat experience bears evidence of: pain and death. And it is the mind itself that stands to suffer most of all:

"The death of Satan vas a tragedy/ For the imagination."

"Satan vas denied in a capital/ Negation," vhlch destroyed him

"And, vlth him, many blue phenomena," many good things created by evil.

Skkan knev that one day he vould be denied. For it vas an ancient pattern in the universe for sons to rebel against their fathers. As Lucipher, he had once lived "in a consummate prime." But desiring "A further con­ summation," like the yellov sun of part VI, he rejected God's authority in the attempt to live vithout an intercessor betveen himself and what­ ever vas outside him. He tried to be his ovn master, his ovn lav. His act of disobedience to God vas an act of poverful genius and of poverful evil. As punishment, he vas rejected, thrown out of paradise, but not destroyed. His attempt to perfect himself vent "askew," and he vas cast away into Hell. But the son took his revenge against the father by cor-

i ruptlng man, making him, thereby, his own son. Because he himself had

once rebelled against the authority of his father, he knew In advance

that man would rebel against his own authority one day: "He knew /

That his revenge created filial/ Revenges." But when Satan's power

was eclipsed, the destruction was exceedingly serene, almost antL-climact-

1c: "negation was eccentric./ It had nothing of the Julian thunder­

cloud;/ The assassin flash and rumble." He was quietly denied, quietly

ignored, as though he hadn't even existed. And since then all the phan­

toms of good and evil have dissolved. They have no place, and, therefore,

it seems that they have no substance. And now, their rejection, a fait-

accorapli, has issued in no good: "How cold the vacancy/ When the phan­

toms are gone and the shaken realist/ First sees reality." Could it

be that Satan himself was once a familiar and desired companion and that

man is now frightened by the thought of having to live without him?

Satan, then, has indeed been sweetly avenged for having been annulled by man. For evil exists, but now no longer in the comprehensible form

of Satan. But the instinct for nobility in man, which cries out for

forms, must find a way once again of containing evil, of expressing it

in some form so that we do not live in utter dread of it when we feel

it; for our terror has been compounded by our ignorance. The imagina­

tion, then, must have another kind of Satan, cries out for it, as its

single means of survival:

In the yes of the realist spoken because he must Say yes, spoken because under every no Lay a passion for yes that had never been broken.

Satan was rejected as silently as pain was denied by the connoisseur of 2kQ

Vesuvius. Yet both Satan and pain are a part of life and cannot be denied. That Is why having rejected Satan, one begins to crave him

once again.

But the demand for Satan Is not Immediately answered. For the forms for evil cannot easily be granted. And so we must endure the experience of evil— which, after man's ambitious denial of Satan, de­ teriorates Into panic. We feel "Panic in the face of the moon," In the face of the moon of pain, of evil and all those things that, In part II, the man In Naples tried to deny. Evil, the monster In "The

Man with the Blue Guitar," vividly experienced In nightmare, inacces­ sible to our conscious minds. It still exists— In spite of whatever efforts one may make to deny it— as a "transmutation which, when seen, appears/ To be askew" (p. 318)* Satan disguised by a benign view of the world-- takes the form of "phosphored sleep," and the "phosphored fruit," of the "round effendi," the plump sybarite. Of course, the , effendi cannot even recognize evil when he sees It, glazed as it was for the "Secretary of Porcelain" in "Extracts from Addressees.Never­ theless, he sends it "ahead, oht of the goodness of his heart," a hypo­ critical gesture, designed mostly to assuage the panic which he cannot understand, and to serve, perhaps, as a false peace-offering. But no­ thing good can come from this action; the gesture of kindness is false, and has no lasting value:

The moon is no longer these nor anything And nothing is left but comic ugliness Or a lustered nothingness (p. 320).

Without a positive good and evil, there remains only "terra infidel," 2*4-9 earth twisted into "comic ugliness." In spite of his authority, wealth and precious ware, "Effendi, he/ That has lost the folly of the moon becomes/ The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty" (p. 320). The eye grows into a staring monster, unaware that it once had "its own miracu­

lous thrift." And "The paradise of meaning" becomes intolerable; for he loses desire to understand himself and anything that lay beyond:

it is this to be destitute. This is the sky divested of its fountains. Here in the west, indifferent crickets chant Through our indifferent crisis (p. 321).

One has but to compare these lines with the compassionate celebration

of the soldier's wound to see what it means to live in a world without meaning because without a Satan. Through darkness and deprivation,

we require Another chant, an incantation, as in Another and later genesis, music That buffets the shapes of its possible halycon Against the haggardie...A loud, large water Bubbles up in the night and drowns the crickets' sound. It is a declaration, a primitive ecstasy, Truth's favors sonorously exhibited.

One often desires a hymn of pure good, purified of all evil. Yet there can be no mind, no genius, vithout evil. For the wages of an existence of pure pleasure are the somnolence, sensuality, solitude of unfulfilled being.

The connoisseur of pain "had studied the nostalgias," all the things he had rejected: pain, evil^'Satan. Knowing that he had denied himself the feeling of Intense pleasure— even as he rejected pain— he cries out passionately for some means of recovering good without evil. He wants to return to the vomb-llke existence of 250

the most grossly maternal, the creature Who most fecundly assuaged him, the softest Woman vlth a vague moustache and not the mauve Mamam.. His anima liked Its animal And liked It unsubjugated, so that home Was a return to birth.

He wants the pleasure of the flesh Intensely felt, the animal "unsub­ jugated" fiercely drowning the soul in a stifling embrace. Ofce return to the womb Is not a quiet surrender, but rather an aggressive pursuit.

The flesh is an end in itself; it points to nothing beyond.

In his image of a purely physical existence with the womb, where all of one's needs are fulfilled, he is able to identify reality not with pain and suffering, but rather with pleasure. It is this kind of

reality which he complacently refers to when he says with a disarmingly

calm air: "Reality explained." But what is the genuine meaning of

"reality"? And what precisely does it explain in the end? For Stevens

reality is suffering, death, and evil. But when this connoisseur of

evil, who casts away the truth, is forced to face evil as "the last nos­ talgia," he calls it "the innocence of living.” He is not altogether certain that suffering and pain are innocent: "If life/ Itself was in­ nocent." But he does not really care to test the reality of his beliefs.

All he knows is that he must believe life is innocent, even if it is not.

For without such a benevolent belief to insulate him from pain, he im^Ues that he would be driven back to the womb by the "sleek ensolaclngs" of the "fecund mother." He knows, however, that such regression is not pos­ sible; and that is why he feels he must make life as endurable for him­ self as possible, by trying to believe that it is "innocent." In the following stanza, therefore, he strives to resolve the opposites of pain and innocence by calling life a "bitter aspic." 251

But what an absurdly hyper-civilized vay of describing evil. He

would reduce life to an aspic, making it palatable, something there to

nourish us, rather than to devour us. Evil, reduced, gone “askew" once

again, becomes atbest "bitter." Even though we "are not/ At the center

of a diamond,” we are still close enough to the center, so that we can­

not clearly perceive what is taking place outside. Evil and destruction

are distant, therefore made tranquil; the blood red wounds, no longer

visible before us:

At dawn, The paratroopers fall and as they fall They mow the lawn. A vessel sinks in waves Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell Bell-bellow in the village steeple.

What a pleasant way to sing out "farewell, farewell, farewell." These

are the tunes of the connoisseur and the sentimentalist, detached from

pain and life, willing to coat evil with the "gaiety of language," for

them their true "seigneur." But the genius of passion and "of bitter

appetite despises/ A well-made scene." He loathes the preposterous

poses, the devitalization arising from a sentimental and unlnvolved

view of evil and death, and parodies this inane ugly comedy of life:

A man of bitter appetite despises A well-made scene in which paratroopers Select adleux; and he despises this: A ship that rolls on a confected ocean, The weather pink, the wind in motion; and this: A steeple that tip-tops the classic sun's Arrangements; and the violet's exhumo.

Savoring pain, he nonetheless eludes the evil that is at its source, by pressing for the nuances of pain— "these exacerbations”— to that point of refinement where pain dissolves into pleasure. It is art, the inter­ 252

cessor between himself and pain, that he experiences. But he cannot

get at the real thing:

The tongue caresses these exacerbations. They press It as epicure, distinguishing Themselves from Its essential savor, Like hunger that feeds on Its own hungriness.

Insulated from evil through art, he is also protected by theory.

"he disposes the world In categories, thus:/ The peopled and the un­

peopled." He makes sure that In both worlds he Is fully insured against

experiencing pain. For "In both, he is alone." But he is not quite ae-

lone. For in each world, together with him are his own ideas, his know­

ledge. And he demands to know whether or not his knowledge is true. The

search for truth, the desire to submit his ideas to some kind of test,

instead of blithely assuming they are correct, leads him once again to­

ward reality:

Is it himself in them that he knowB or they In him? If it is himself in them, they have Ho secret from him. If it is they in him, He has no secret from them. This knowledge Of them and of himself destroys both worlds, Except when he escapes from it. To be Alone is not to know them or himself.

His questions seem to be leading to a condition where he cannot distin­

guish himself from others, where indeed he is not alone, but rather part

of a larger whole. This intimacy with others terrifies him. He Is a-

fraid of being known too well, of being too accessible to others. He

does not want anyone to know him, to enter his life, to share his secrets,

to possess him. He desires to retreat into a world "In which no one peers," noteven himself.. And so he speculates about "a third world without knowledge," without mind, "in which no one peers, in which the 253 will makes no/ Demands. It accepts whatever Is as true,/ Including pain, which, otherwise," with mind to accept or reject, "is false," is denied by the conscious mind. "In the third world, then, there is no pain" because there is no mind to know it. But the price for such an existence is too enormous to pay: loneliness and starvation. For

"What lover has one in such rocks, what woman,/ However known, at the centre of the heart?"

The fear of missing out on love— and the regret for all the pain that goes ■with it--arouses in him once again the instinct for life and reality. Now in section XIII soberly, calmly, directly, he seems to know that pain is human, and he tries to understand why man is destined to experience It:

It may be that one life is a punishment For another, as the son's life for the father's (p. 323).

In these lines and those that follow, Stevens gives us a curious varia­ tion of several lines in section VIII. There, speaking about Satan, he had written: "He knew / That his revenge created filial revenges."

Through his own crimes Satan earns his own punishment. Butj now, in part

XIII, man passively Inherits pain for crimes he has not even committed.

Evil, then, is not the brilliant achievement of the genius, but a state that is to be passively endured. Man as brilliant Satan deteriorates into a passive, helpless victim, attributing the genius of crime to a nameless, idiotic force, "This force of nature in action,...the major/

Tragedy," which— as the final indication of his own stupidity— he calls

"The happiest enemy." To philosophize about life in this way is to ex- 25^

perience "the last nostalgia," Ironically explained by Stevens in part

X: "that he/ Should understand. That he night suffer or that/ He

might die was the Innocence of living" (p. 322, my italics). Instead

of fulfilling himself, therefore, in fierce rejection, he experiences

only exhaustion and waste. "The son/ And the father alike and equally

are spent,/ Each one, by the necessity of being/ Himself." But ironi­

cally this "himself"comes to be only an "unalterable animal," without

spirit to dignify himself, without imagination to earn his own punish­ ment.

Since he had never known evil, death intrudes upon his leisure sud­

denly, unexpectedly. "In his Mediterranean cloister a man," in Naples,

Reclining, eased of desire, establishes The visible, a zone of blue and orange Versicolorings, establishes a time To watch the fire-feinting sea and calls it good, The ultimate good, sure of a reality Of the longest meditation... (p. 32^).

Although he "establishes/ The visible," and "a time/ To watch.. •," . regulating his meditations bo that he can call them good, meditation sets the scene for the assassin, for evil, for thought that leads a- galn and again, if carried on long enough, to reality:

The assassin discloses himself, The force that destroys us is disclosed, within This maximum....

Willing to the very end to accept his punishment with Innocence and o- bedlence, he knows that "This maximum" is "an adventure to be endured/

With the politest helplessness.” And, with the civllest wall, he selects his adieu: "Ay-mlI"

This is the bland philosophy of evil propounded by a man who is 255 happy to play the role of one of the many "secondary characters" In "a

fragmentary tragedy," not of his own making. We observe him incredu­

lously with the same feeling Victor Serge had in commenting upon

Konstantinov:

I followed his argument With the blank uneasiness which one might In the presence of a logical lunatic.

Revolution— but not of the kind Konstantinov argued for— stands at

the core of this poem. What, Indeed, Is revolution as Stevens has ex­

pressed It here? It Is tragic and mad, Interminable, and Incomprehen­

sible. It has its grandiose nothingness and waste, and its sublime

achievements. Fain, suffering, humanity and experience are rejected

by the man who is too frail to confront reality directly. The evil genius, on the other hand, desiring to achieve more perfection than he

Is entitled to have, destroys order, law, religion, art, god-- all of which he claims stand between himself and life. Both kinds of revolu­ tion lead to some kind of destruction: the first, because one escapes from experience; the second, because the Intensity with which one hurls oneself headlong into life is bound to destroy him. To find a ration­ ale that will justify revolution— that will explain why one man dries up for want of any life and another is consumed because he has demanded too much of himself— this task is patently Impossible. For

Revolution Is the affair of logical lunatics. ...The cause Creates a logic not to be distinguished From lunacy.

Better, then, to forget about logic altogether and "To walk/ By the tes, who, for the moment feels delight, even if a casual delight, in the

nobility and the noble breed" (N.A., p. 5)» A similar tone of insistence,

of "ferocious beauty," Stevens writes, is to be found in a line from

Shakespeare: "How with this rage can beauty hold a plea..." For, he goes

on, "Vhile it has its modulation of despair, it holds its plea and its

plea is noble" (N.A., p. 35)• Plea, insistence, and despair are perva­

sive feelings in Stevens * poetry. Indeed^ they are what enobles the

first essay in The Necessary Angel. The imagination desires to believe

in scxnething beautiful, even if unreal; reason corrodes belief, and the mind despairs in its own state of disbelieving.

Identifying with Plato’s noble rider, we soar into the air, Stevens writes, until our spirits, punctured by common sense and reason, sink through space: "The truth is that we have scarcely read the passage be­ fore we have identified ourselves with the charioteer, have, in fact, taken his place and, driving his winged horses, are traversing the whole heaven. Then suddenly, we remember, it may be, that the soul no longer exists and we droop in our flight and at last settle on solid ground.

The figure becomes antiquated and rustic" (N.A., pp. 3-*0 • Although, he goes on, "Plato could yield himself, was free to yield himself, to this gorgeous nonsense," we ourselves are not free to believe in the impossible image of the noble rider flying through space. And yet he notes that we should be able to believe in the figure because of the nobility of the plea and because Plato "does not communicate nobility coldly." There is no use in trying to force oneself to believe, however, if it is simply not possible. Searching into the causes for disbelief, 256

lake at Geneva*../ To think of the logicians (safely, where they belong)

In their graves."

We would gladly reject any philosophy of revolution on the grounds

that It Is the "Idee fixe" of a lunatic. But nature itself, as It were,

unsettles us, makes us doubt in our own sanity. With its weird scenes

nature evokes the same feelings of anxiety we experience when listening

to any philosophy of revolution, any rationale of evil.

A promenade amid the grandeurs of the mind, By a lake, with clouds like lights among great tombs, Gives one a blank uneasiness.

The lake which mirrors the clouds creates the illusion of an intermin­

able ascent into blankness. We lose sight of the earth, grow uneasy,

finally sense "as if/ One might meet Konstantinov, who would interrupt

with his lunacy." "He would not be aware of the lake," of the earth.

His feet would be firmly planted in the air:

He would be the lunatic of one idea In a world of ideas, who would have all the people Live, work, suffer and die in that idea In a world of ideas. He would not be aware of the clouds, Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire (p. 325).

Konstantinov, of course, believes in something patently absurd: "the po­

litics of emotion" which he shaped into "an intellectual structure."

Logic— the mind striving for more perfect consummations— goes awry as

it leads not to reality, to earth, to humanity, but rather to the clouds,

structure, a mad martyrdom, and ecstasy and delusion so intense that they

seem to explode inside of him, lighting him like a radiant and pure dia­ mond. Pushed to its extreme conclusion, logic ends in illogical propo­

sitions about life which, if we would accept them, would destroy all sense of perspective which man needs if he is to live life well. The 1 257

absurd and pathetic fate of the logician gone mad Is that in perfecting

his system, he earns only poverty, not richest "The greatest poverty

is not to live/ In a physical vorld."

Yet, as Stevens has vritten repeatedly, we can have no knowledge

of a vorld beyond mind, a world entirely physical. "Perhaps," he writes

somewhat facetiously, "the non-physical people, in paradise,/ Itself

non-physical, may, by chance, observe/ The green corn gleaming" and ex­

perience the joy we feel in being here on earth. But even so, we are

not entirely rooted in our physical being. For no matter who has tried

to understand the essence of man, no "adventurer/ In humanity has...

conceived of a race/ Completely physical in a physical vorld." Our

experience of all good and bad things on earth point in the end to par­

adises of meanings far beyond us:

The green corn gleams and the metaphysicals Lie sprawling in majors of the August heat, The rotund emotions, paradise unknown.

With these words, the narrative of the man at Naples, Don Juan and

his single rose, the vounds of all the soldiers, the epic anecdote of

Satan, the tranquil mutilation of reality by the artist for whom "life

is a bitter aspic," the serene annihilation of the man by the Mediterran­

ean patiently waiting for a monster to spring out of the sky, Konstantixxvb

logic perfected into lunacy— anecdote, epic, and parable all come to an end. What precisely do they amount to? In the manner of the medie­

val exemplum, Stevens writes:

This is the thesis scrivened in delight, The reverberating psalm, the right chorale. 258

He swerves decisively toward a direct statement, "but just as abruptly— before one can grasp the meaning— he escapes with sly agility, leaving the path of his exit confused and blurred. The lines are cryptic and direct: the final words of a wise fool. The dark meanings are dis­ closed with levity and, therefore, made almost non-senslcal, deliber­ ately unintelligible. Both Stevens and ours therefore is a limited knowledge of reality, the only kind there can be in a world that is part-mind, part-earth. We do not desire the lucid madness of Konstan­ tinov. Nor can we achieve pure mindlessness, where there is no know­ ledge. Whatever knowledge we have cannot be formulated into a coherent statement, into a logical structure. For Stevens it can only take the form of an esthetic of evil.

And therefore although one "might have thought of sight," "Who could think of what it sees;" who could know precisely what one had seen? And who, listening to "all the evil sound," could propound "the dark italics?" No one can, of course, though every man tries to. And this is the mad, whimsical, glorious fact that redeems everyone— cowards, saints, lunatics, and evil geniuses alike. For through his imagination, man has created

So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live.

The final stanza of "Esthetique du Mai” like the final stanza of

"The Man with the Blue Guitar" ends in riddles and obscure prophecies, symptoms of Irresolution. As we have observed earlier, Stevens' fondest hope was, in the absense of reHgion, to establish art as the intercessor between man and the absolute. But all of his speculations In "The Man with the Blue Guitar" and In Parts of a World confirm his Initial obser­ vation that art is doomed to fail because the noble particular in reality is distorted by the artist into a "bruted form." To eradicate distortion from art, Stevens discovers its sources not within works of art, but within the personality of the artist. For Stevens, distortion (an unreal vision) derives from an imbalance between the imagination and reality.

To create art which does not express such Imbalance, the artist must have a vision of life wherein the facts of pain and death are seen as evil, a human condition willingly endured. Such limitation— such defi­ nition of evil— of course is acceptable neither to the man of grandiose passion, nor to the connoisseur of pain. The first is guided by the desire to transcend his limitations and perfect himself; the second, by the desire to retreat from those limitations (his obligations to live a human, fully matured existence) and to protect himself, The punishment that each man earns on earth is governed by his particular aesthetic of evil. The connoisseur of pain who never engages actively in life suffers a life-in-death caused by an atrophy of will, feeling and mind. The man consumed with the desire to perfect himself squanders his powers and ex­ hausts himself; his llfe-ln-death is brought about through a hyper­ trophy of will, feeling, and mind.

The man who would save himself is guided by the commandment that he shall not be led unto suffering and death. And therefore the con­ noisseur of Vesuvius imputes pain to Vesuvius, which can feel nothing.

The sentimentalist, who shies away from any close contact with others, 2 6 0 enjoys all sorts of flowers in a casual way. The effendi attempts to gloss pain over with rich and decorative artifacts. The man at the

Mediterranean tries to deny that evil exists at all, by calling disaster a happy friend. The artist transforms destruction into a fascinating landscape of forms. The man who refuses to tolerate pain in any degree desires to retreat into the womb. And finally, the man who cannot tolerate meditation which tortures him with all kinds of doubts, desires to live in a "third world," in which there is no thought. The greatest irony of all their efforts to avoid evil is that they are destined to experience it in the long run, and to express it in everything they do, in all kinds of forms: whether as artifice, comic ugliness, or the mon­ ster in the nightmare.

Unlike men of this mold is the man who is pained only because he cannot be content with what he is and with what he has. Evil (suffering and death) is not inflicted upon him as a human condition to be endured.

Bather, the kind of punishment he must endure is generated solely by himself at that moment when he strives to break down his own limitations.

Don Juan might have been perfect possessing only one rose. But with his

Insatiable appetite for life, he dissipated his strength on all sorts of flowers. Like Don Juan, the sun could not tolerate any limitation, nor could the mad logician, Konstantinov, vho strove to find the ration­ ale of revolution. They experienced Joy only in trying to do something that is patently impossible. But in the long run, all of them are des­ tined to suffer, as their efforts to perfect themselves go awry.

It is the commitment to self-perfection that is for Stevens the only esthetic he would be guided by from the beginning of his career. 26l

With "The Comedian..." the aspiration for self-perfection had gone "as­ kew," as we observed, because Crispin's imagination,almost.completely

destroyed at the beginning of his odyssey, constructed a reality that was base. From the poems in Harmonium perfection was associated for

Stevens with the aspiration to paradise. In "Esthetique du Mai" Stevens

observes grimly that the quest for perfection ends in death and that

the quest itself is inherently evil.

The poems that follow "Esthetique du Mai" reveal Stevens acting out the tragic rhythms of self-perfection and death. It was his desire, as we have observed, to create the ultimate poem as the Intercessor between man and the absolute. He realized that his goal was as ambitious as Satan's: to transcend his limitations. Continuing to sustain ambi­ tions patently suicidal in the face of such knowledge, Stevens must have felt unable to restrain the instinct of nobility. Or perhaps he clung to the illusion that he could break the tragic cycle of crime

(perfectlon)and punishment. Indeed, the poems at the end of his career demonstrate that while he continued to believe that he would write the ultimate poem, he realized that art of the kind he aspired for was not possible. But in his final poems, the possibility of any kind of art comes to be secondary to the question of his own survival. At times he seems quite willingly to forfeit his human existence and welcome the non-human existence of an abstraction. But for the most part he lived in utter despair and horror of dying, and he believed that his attempts to perfect himself would fail altogether unless he could be guaranteed that when he died he would be transported bodily into paradise. 262

Were Christ himself to come down to earth, Stevens would still remain unsatisfied. For he desired more than to know that there is a truth which he may experience after death. Instead, he Insisted on experiencing the truth immediately, without waiting patiently for death

to take him. He did not desire a principle or a symbol of that truth which would serve as intercessor between himself and the divine. He did not desire a religion or a dying god that would be the incarnation of the absolute. Instead, Stevens desired to achieve for himself the vl- sions both of humanity and of what lay beyond: the intersection of the timeless with time. That miraculous fusion of the human and the unhuman i is not therefore simply a principle that he will accept on faith. It

! is an experience to be initiated and endured.

"A metamorphosis of paradise"

To believe that paradise exists without making any attempt to visualize it takes an act of faith of which few people are capable.

Visualizing paradise indicates that one wishes to have proof of its existence; one dreams, that is, of seeing a miracle which can instan­ taneously prove the existence of something divine. To live without either miracle, mystery, or authority is virtually impossible for any human being. Stevens can live without authority; in fact, he refuses to tolerate any that comes between him and the absolute. At times he l sanctions mystery, at times he is deeply engaged in penetrating it.

But forever he is searching for the miracle. In his early poem "Sun­ day Morning," the lady ecstatically envisions an ideal paradise. In stanza VII, she dreams that "the trees, like sarafln, and echoing hills" will sing of the "heavenly fellowship/ Of men that perish," and that

"The dev upon their feet shall manifest" the origin of man and his hea­ venly destiny (italics mine)* As Stevens himself observed, the lady's dream- of paradise is much too romantic, too unreal. Yet he himself never ceased to speculate about the unreal and the possibilities of making it real— making it manifest, performing the miracle himself.

In "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," he writes that the poet must begin with the unreal and move toward the real, transforming the impossible into the actual.

In his final poems Stevens is concerned to establish the existence of paradise. He knows that he must conjure ex nihilo an image of para­ dise in order to believe that it exists. He needs to be assured that it exists, for his own continuing survival depends upon its existence. If he can say that it is, then he can say: I shall continue to be. The relationship between place and man's existence is the subject of many of the speculations in "Extracts from Addresses....” It was Indeed an obsession with him; it was also, as he acknowledged in Adagla a grave limitation: "Life is an affair of people not of places. But for me life is an affair of places and that is the trouble" (O.P., p. 158).

His concern in Transport to Summer, Auroras of Autumn, and The Rock is not to establish what is more or less patently obvious to a sane man: that the sensuous world exists. Rather he would establish the sensuous­ ness, the manifestation of the non-sensuous world. For without paradise there is no place for him to go, when he dies. There is no place for the soldier either. Darkness, nothingness of human after-death, Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space—

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which We believe without belief, beyond belief (p. 336).

Belief in paradise and in hell, in realities above and below the earth, has been shaken by the fact that these two regions nominally no longer exist. As Stevens had written in "Esthetique du Mai," when Satan and

"many blue phenomena" were denied in "a capital negation," along with him and them were destroyed the places where they resided:

Phantoms, what have you left? What underground? What place in which to be is not enough To be? You go, poor phantoms, without place (p. 320).

Yet Stevens believes in the idea of the place of heaven, even as he believes in the idea of God. But the idea of paradise cannot suffice to satisfy his quest for perfection. He must have the manifestations,. the forms, of those ideas. Unable to live without them, he cries out for them. While, therefore, art is irrelevant in paradise itself, on earth it becomes necessary so that he can be sure that paradise does in fact exist. There was one crucial question Stevens realized he would have to answer: how was he to conjure a vision of paradise that would be believable?

He did not want to pose as either angel or oracle, but instead to speak clearly about human experiences with all the knowledge that he could possibly achieve.

To say more than human things with human voice, That cannot be; to say human things with more Than human voice, that, also, cannot be; To speak humanly from the height or from the depth Of human things, that is acutest speech (p. 300). His purpose, of course, was to write what he called in "A collect of

Philosophy" a "cosmic poem," that is, abstraction purified of all im­

perfections and illusions. But he realized well that his goal was ex­

ceedingly ambitious: "It is cosmic poetry because it makes us realize

in the same way in which an escape from all our limitations would make

us realize that we are creatures not of a part, which is our everyday

limitation, but of a whole for which, for the most part, we have as yet _

no language11 (O.P., p. 189, my italics). His preoccupation with theory

at this point in his career, he hoped, would enable him to arrive at

"as poetic a concept as the idea of the infinity of the world." To

develop his beliefs, he tried to achieve the "poet's natural way of

thinking...by way of figures of speech...examples, illustrations and

parallel cases..." (O.P., p. l8U). Perhaps the major difference between

his mode of inquiry and the philosopher's is that Stevens intensified

the air of ambiguity, the impenetrable air of mystery which he felt is

the only real quality one can respond to in coping with non-human ex­

periences. Indeed, in the poem "Man Carrying Thing" (p. 350), he in­

sists that mystery is the chief requirement of poetry:

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists . Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense.

To conjure a vision of paradise, Stevens created andaLr of unfami­

liarity and mystery which imply that the hereafter impinging upon human

experience seems strange, indistinct, anonymous. In "less and Less Hu­ man, 0 Savage Spirit" (p. 328), he writes: 22

Stevens writes that the cause is in the mind Itself, which has changed

from Plato's time to ours. Although Plato knew that the Image was un­

real, he could yield himself to believing it for his Imagination had the

strength to adhere to something that It knew was patently unreal. But

our Imagination, Stevens concedes, has "lost its power to” sustain be­

lief In the unreal: The Imagination "has the strength of reality or

none at all." To grow strong the imagination of our age must have its

beliefs sanctioned by reason, but reason refuses to suspend disbelief

when faced with a hypothesis which contradicts our sense perceptions.

To "satisfy the mind," the forms of nobility must, then, adhere to

reality, which is to say that they cannot contradict one's sense per­

ceptions. Since art is so dependent upon sensuous reality, it would

seem then that the imagination would automatically turn to sensuous real­

ity for forms. But the fact is that it is seeking frantically to escape

from the sensuous world and into the direction of the unreal, the non-

sensuous. To the imagination the sensuous world is fraught with ugli­

ness, distortion of the beautiful and the good, monstrosity, death. It

is striving for manifestations of nobility that are pure and beautiful; but because all things bear witness increasingly to the prevalence of

ugliness and death, it has no choice but to escape into the unreal, the non-sensuous. Reason, of course, checks its flight into the unreal ev­ ery time the imagination in its pursuit of the ideal of purity begins to

soar far beyond the sensuous world.

For reason, therefore, reality exists in the sensuous world; for the imagination, it exists as something pure, Inviolable, non-sensuous. 266

If there must he a god in the house, let him he one That will not hear us when we speak: a coolness, A vermilioned nothingness, any stick of the mass Of which we are too distinctly a part.

In this' poem it is heaven which is mysterious. But in the first part

of 'the Rock," Stevens is estranged from his life on earth, which, he

writes, is an illusion. In "Less and Less Human..." he feels the

mysterious power of paradise; in "The Rock" he appears already to have

heoome an inhabitant of another plane of reality, detached from his

earthly existence and viewing his life on earth with irony and cool­

ness.

When Stevens records the feelings of estrangement from earthly

things in Transport to Summer he appears to he too much at home in

paradise, much too exuberant there. His description of the ultimate

man, the absolute, the "major man" in "Faisant Chronicle" is a bore

because the unreal is too familiar to him, because, that is, he speaks

about it with too certain an air of definition. When he attempts to

define paradise in detail, maintaining a sober air, he appears to lose

a sense of perspective. But whenever his air is jaunty, as It is in

"The Pure Good of Theory" (p. 329), the image of paradise Improvised with delight and vigor is pleasing. The poem is especially lively in part III, "Fire-monsters in the Milky Brain":

He knew one parent must have been divine, Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia, Whose mind malformed this morning metaphor,

While all the leaves leaked gold. His mind made morning, As he slept. He woke in a metaphor: this was A metamorphosis of paradise.

When the air is jaunty and the details are specific, one can enjoy the 267

vision of paradise, but not really believe it. When the details are

specific and delivered with high seriousness, we can neither enjoy nor

believe the vision.

Entertainment in his poems was, of course, always secondary to the

serious intention of devising a paradise that could sustain belief. The

poems in Auroras of Autumn and The Bock disclose Stevens' tragic efforts

to resolve the humanistic and anti-humanistic view of the absolute. His

attempts to achieve resolution, of course, were destined to fail. Indeed,

the very possibility of resolution had been corroded from the very be­

ginning of his career by a sceptical questioning which constantly de­

flated the imagination. Once the power of the tragic truths of "Esthe­

tique du Mai” had blasted away the "romantic tenements" of "Notes To­ ward a Supreme Fiction," Stevens* strongest Inclination was to evolve beyond a vision of the supreme fiction and to disclose the absolute as it really exists, without any fictive covering whatsoever. But his de­ sire to write the ultimate poem and achieve pure abstraction was strong­ ly frustrated by the opposing desire to achieve a compromised vision of paradise which could resolve the opposing views of absolute as supreme fiction and as abstraction. That he was tormented to the very end of his career by the knowledge that his goals were too ambitious and that his achievements could only be illusory does not indicate that he failed as an artist. Bather his sense of perspective, his unwillingness to take himself as a secular saint, in a word, his humility even at the fi­ nal moment when he might have boasted that he fulfilled his grandiose ambitions-- all this is perhaps the finest measure of his strength as a person and his greatness as an artist. CHAPTER VI

"IN THE STALE GRANDEUR OF ANNIHILATION"

The desire to achieve a sense of resolution and affirmation to

the problemsraised in "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of

Fine Ideas," anil "An Examination of a Hero in Time of War" is fulfilled

in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," where Stevens sanctions and ele­

vates life on earth. In the summer of his life he celebrates human

limitations as the means of knowing reality and living richly, per­

fectly, in the world. But Stevens strives for yet more perfect con­

summations; and, therefore, the summer of "Notes..," is destined to be

followed by the autumn of "Esthetique du Mai," the "veritable season."

There, the mind, discontent with the facile synthesis of the real and

the ideal, the particular and the abstraction once again sees the world falling apart; the real particular striving without any success to

establish some connection with the absolute. The question, of course,

is whether or not a synthesis of heaven and earth is ever achieved. In parts of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" Stevens achieves a synthe­

sis for a fraction of a second. On the other hand, even in that poem, he sees the world disunified, structured in terms of the either-or he starkly perceived in "Extracts..," and "Examination of a Hero...." He can write of the earth and of humanity; he tries to conceive of the angelic imagination and paradise. But he cannot conceive of a synthesis between these two orders of reality. At times he believes that the ideal place to be is in paradise, abstracted, completely dehumanized.

268 269

But in his most powerful and convincing poems, he is loathe to conceive

of paradise and of himself as utterly dehumanized, because he is agon?-

ized at the thought of dying and losing his humanity.

The final poems reveal him fitfully, tragically trying to sustain

any number of contrary beliefs. In some poems he sees himself immortal­

ized in paradise; in others he is agonized, when, desiring to live for­

ever, his fear of death grows desperate. In still other poems, the

dialectic, which is tortured and false, implies that he is struggling to achieve a believable synthesis of heaven and earth, so that he can

envision himself being bodily transported into heaven. In the discussion of Stevens' final poems, I begin with his attempt to achieve for the very last time a vision of the absolute humanistically conceived. Be­ lief in such a synthesis between earth and heaven breaks down at one moment in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven;" the poems discussed sub­ sequently reveal Stevens' reflections on the either-or view of the ab­ solute. He is anguished because he realizes that the price he must pay for failing to achieve a synthesis of heaven and earth is death. Finally in "The Rock" he achieves only the illusion of a synthesis, projecting the most noble vision of wish-fulfillment in all of his poetry.

After the breakdown of unity between earth and heaven last sustained in "Notes..," Stevens attempts once again to discover the grounds upon which a new correspondence between the imagination and reality is to be established. In one of his finest insights into Stevens' thought, Roy

Harvey Pearce analyzes the implications of those new "grounds."

What the Rock" comes to is something like this: that since, the self cannot be creative unless it has a reality 270 upon, in, and through which to he creative, self and reality must at some ultimate point (in time, or space, or reason, or all three?) be integral, each partaking of the other. An enormous pun is involved: "Ground" as a philosophical term is equated vith "ground" in its mundane meaning. Yet perhaps it is not a pun, but a way of pointing to a trans­ cendence in imagination of our need to describe our sense of things metaphorically, and so acknowledge the division of reality from imagination which splits us in two. The ground-as-source has been reached, or at least pointed to. And now, strengthened in its own realization that it is bound up integrally in the reality which it must daily con­ front, the self is free to be itself, because it accepts the fact that it can be nothing else.’*-

The central question that this statement raises is precisely in what way is the imagination Integrally a part of reality in the poems that follow the previous synthesis of the real and the ideal achieved in

"Notes..."? The answer is that the "grounds" themselves become sub- tlized, the concrete surfaces of things corroded, reduced to thin veils.

The body is shed like the skin of the snake in "The Auroras of Autumn," in what is the most extreme rejection in Stevens' poetry: one that re­ veals nothing more than the disembodied form of man: a being both human and non-human, with and without form, in the process of perfecting it­ self into pure abstraction by dissolving in space. Stevens is not con­ tent solely to conjure dissolving forms; he must define the precise

"grounds" upon which man is made integral with the absolute, the pre­ cise degree of accord between sensuous reality and pure abstraction.

This theme then, the poet's vision of the absolute and of human exper­ ience, is probed for the last time with sustained Intensity in "An

Ordinary Evening in Hew Haven" (p. U65).

Beginning calmly, Stevens states: "The eye's plain version is a thing apart." The question implied here is: What is the relationship 1 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 196l) p. kll. All citations from H.H. Pearce are to this text. 271 between the mind and reality? Apart from what? The ego or reality as a thing in itself? The ambiguity is intentional* Attempting for the last time to patch the world as best as he can, Stevens obviously can­ not propose to deliver an either-or answer which rips the Imagination apart from reality. Bather he wishes to establish that precise point at which the imagination and reality conjoin. The mid-point between those two entities hypothetically constitutes for him neither one nor the other, but both'at one and the same time.

The thing apart from both mind and no-mind— and yet a synthesis of both— 1b the eye’s plain version, "the vulgate of experience." Pre­ cisely how is the eye’s plain version related to the mind? How is it related to things apart from the mind? Without the mind, reality (seen through the eye of a mindless being) is given meaning only by the sun through whose force reality dissolves, is decreated. Under the Impact of the destructive, more powerful imagination of a non-human source, reality is seea as

These houses, these difficult objects, delapldate Appearances of what appearances, Words, lines, not meanings, not communications.

Things in themselves, not perceived by a creature with a human mind are

"Dark things without a double,../ Unless a second giant kills the first".

The second giant is "A recent imagining of reality," by the human mind which destroys non-human perception and grants human meanings once again to reality. In the very first poem of "An Ordinary Evening..." the poet confronts the monster, non-human reality. But no struggle breaks out between them. For in the second poem, the mind attempting to resolve 272 itself into non-human reality, is purged of the grossly human; and the non-human turns out not to he a monster, hut a saint. Resolution into the non-human, therefore, Issues in beatitude.

The mind, brought close to the source of power, (the sun which is the metaphor for life), is partly consumed#. by it, so that the great human "bosom, beard and being, alive vlth age" is transfigured and met­ amorphosed into an Impalpable being whose vision of the vorld subtlizes and purifies concrete reality along with all intrinsically human attri­ butes .

Suppose these houses are composed of ourselves, So that they become an Impalpable town, full of Impalpable bells, transparencies of sound,

Sounding in transparent dwellings of the self, Impalpable habitations that seem to move In the movement of the colors of the mind.

The vision is at once precise and at the same time indefinite, uncertain.

"Confused illuminations and sonorities,/ So much ourselves, we cannot tell apart/ The idea and the bearer-being of the idea." The idea and the particular are identified in this state of being so that they no longer can be distinguished. No longer able to abstract the idea from the particular, the mind as a distinct entity in the universe is itself on the point of dissolving. This is the state of beatitude, where the mind, having finally been satisfied, no longer feels the need to search and therefore ceases to sense Itself existing Btrenously, self-conscious­ ly as mind. "The point of vision and desire are the same.” From the human point of view, the plainnessof things ultimately is deliberate ob­ scurity. And one's desire is satisfied at the point where will and mind 273

disintegrate. That heavenly annihilation is devoutly desired— at

least in "An Ordinary Evening..." if not in many of his other final

poems— as the will to he holy, "the desire for love,"

The desire for its celestial ease in the heart, Which nothing can frustrate, that most secure, Unlike love in possession of which was To he possessed.

This desire neither to possess nor to he possessed is "set deep" within

all actual things, emptying themselves "In denial that cannot contain

its hlood." For the desire for holiness is degraded hy heing contained

in "actual things." The desire for purity is like the soul contained

in the hody which ±a a prison. The more the soul yearns for paradise,

the more frustrated it becomes until perversely it strives to arrive at

"The plainness of plain things" (IV), furiously clawing through levels

of Illusion until it thinks it has arrived at truth.

But if to possess truth, one must not experience the false pride

and pompous victory of possession and subjugation, how much less truth

one perceives through "savagery,/ As: the last plainness of a man who

has fought/ Against illusion and was, in a great grinding/ Of growling

teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out/ By the obese opiates of sleep."

Man struggles against illusion, which for him is both the false, the

romantic, and the indefinite; attempts to devour truth like a cannibal; but in the end, his efforts rather than being sustained, dissolve in drugged, bestial torpor. As Stevens remarks with detached and amused

irony: "Plain men in plain towns/ Are not precise about the appeasement they need." They require, he writes, savage cries which comfort them,

"In a savage and subtle and simple harmony," Their hymn of pleasure is 2 7 4

the answer to "a diviner opposite," Theirs is a "lewd spring," which

soothes "with pleasant instruments," so that the enormous mysteries of

our origins and our destiny are degraded into bed-time stories for chil­

dren, their "tale of ice."

These, then, are the false engagements of the mind, the

Inescapable romance, inescapable choice Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion, Reality as a thing seen by the mind.

Man is destined to believe that truth masquerades as the thing savagely

possessed, to suffer in the end "disillusion as the last illusion." Dis­

illusion, however, is not the ultimate state of being. For the final

state, where desire is fulfilled is "celestial ease in the heart." It

is a state which man is to experience only after he is dead. For Stevens

then, the ideal is to experience on earth the pure bliss of celestial

fulfillment. Alive, one never experiences it absolutely unless one is

a saint. Surely, since the mind no longer exists abstracted from exper­

ience in this state, meditation no longer is sustained, or even relevant.

Caught between this world and the hereafter which he desires to achieve,

Stevens attempts to meditate a state of beatitude and the kind of know­

ledge of the world and of humanity he would have in partaking of that

state.

He realizes first of all the disparity between the real and the

ideal, both of which are parts of "The self, the chrysalis of all men" which "Became divided." "One part/ Held fast tenaciously in common

earth/ And one from central earth to central sky." Man, born on earth, aspired to paradise; every roan, therefore, has a double which is his 275 necessary angel. Stevens writes that the absolute, the highest reality, has only a beginning and not an end. It is changeless, transcendent,

"naked Alpha," and not everything that is a part of time which elaborates, expounds, develops the Infant beginning. Alpha is the immaculate first thing constantly repeating itself. "Omega,/ Of dense Investiture" is diversity, particularity, form, substance; it is also history. Instead of conceiving of them at odds, even while they are mutually exclusive, even while "Alpha fears men or else Omega's men," Stevens writes in a conic and jaunty manner that they seem to coexist quite peacefully.

Since both alike appoint themselves the choice Custodians of the glory of the scene, The immaculate interpreters of life.

But that's the difference: in the end and the way To the end. Alpha continues to begin. Omega is refreshed at every end.

On earth, life is "more fecund, sportive, and alive," in the presence of forms, "Such chapels and such schools." But enamoured of forms, peo­ ple go so far as to cast away their own human attributes by objectifying them into "things," "as comedy,/ Stood, dressed in antic symbols, to display/ The truth about themselves." They should rather conceal them­ selves. Instead they exalt themselves in gaudy and vulgar display, of­ fering "The tips of cock-cry pinked out pastily" as though they were the incarnation of the sublime, when, in fact, they are only a comic degra­ dation of the incredible. Intensely private experiences are the Snly means of transfiguration. Then "looks and feelings mingle and are part/

As a quick ansver modifies a question," and "Two bodies (are) disembo­ died, in their talk." V Since, as I have observed, it is reason which accommodates itself to the

imagination (or wish, which is in the end the strongest instinct in man),

Stevens' firm belief is that the reality he would grasp and express is pure, non-sensuous, abstract; that the imagination strives to escape the pressures of a sensuous reality that is imperfect and ugly; and finally, that reason makes the unreal, for which the imagination pleads, real and therefore ultimately believable. The moment of purity, he writes in "The

Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," occurs when the imagination triumphs over what is incredible and sustains the noble spirit. The process of de­ finition, of achieving credible forms, therefore is neither reductionist nor restrictive, for the imagination is not debased by reason; nor is the definition that is finally achieved unreal, since reason explains, ac­ counts for as it were, the imagination's wish, thereby sanctioning it as a belief.

The opposition between reason and the imagination expresses a dif­ ference between two kinds of reality: one which has substance, one which does not; one which is clearly defined, anti-poetic and ugly a- gainst one which is indefinite, unreal, and beautiful. In the poems collected in Harmonium Stevens attempts to achieve a synthesis of these opposing views of reality, hoping that he can find something beautiful and pure that is a part of sensuous reality. He comes, however, to be­ lieve that everything sensuous is impure and ugly; and in "Parts of a

World," he conceives of these two views of reality as being fiercely opposed. Unable to sustain belief in, to sanction both kinds of real­ ities, he comes to establish criteria that will define what reality 276

The two following poems (DC, X) belabor the vision of the world as

"pure reality" seen through the spirit purified of human imperfections.

"We seek/ Nothing beyond reality. Within it,/ Everything." The poems

of pure reality, as Stevens writes are

untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself....

The state of beatitude, as much of it as is possible to human beings,

is expressed by a series of paradoxes: "The solid, but the movable;"

It resides In a permanence composed of Impermanence, In a faithfulness as against the lunar light.

Most important, "We do not know what is real and what is not;" we do

not know the imagined apart from the real and, furthermore, the mind

satisfied does not even desire to know that distinction. The mind and

reality apart from it, the particular and the abstraction "Becomes arm-

massed in a total double-thing." That single thing resides within the

spirit! It expresses "This faithfulness of reality, this mode,/ This

tendance and venerable holding-in/" containment of oneself.

The singlBness of being achieved through the union of fact and

concept is sustained in the following few poems. It is expressed

through the paradox implied in the opening line of the 11th poem: "In

the metaphysical streets of the physical town." The poet recollects

"the lion of Juda,” a powerful fact which makes him hesitate to utter the meaning implied by it. For, as he writes, "The phrase grows weak.

The fact takes up the strength/ Of the phrase." Meaning is communicated 277

by the particular. No generalization, therefore, is necessary to pro­

pound that naked fact and to introduce yet another fact. Rather one

fact leads immediately into another. "And Juda becomes New Haven or

else must." No concept, therefore, acts as intercessor between him­

self and the experience of "the profoundest forms." He greets them,

as he greets facts. Every instant he destroys the forms which he never­

theless requires. For, as he writes, "The poem is not a generalization,

propounding the meaning of the "res itself." Rather it is one with

the thing, just as the fact of Juda bore its own meaning that did not

require abstracting.

The poem is indeed the cry of the present,"The mobile and the

immobile flickering/ In the area between is and was." But the present

is destined to be part of the past. "The wind will have passed by,/ The

statues will have gone back to be things about" reality, rather than a

part of reality. The present itself is ecstasy, where the mind (the poem)

and the thing (res) are one and the same thing. However, the poem out­

living the thing is gradually drained of life. The occasion no longer

obtains. In the end, everything that outlasts the present whirls a-

round helplessly, lifelessly "in a casual litter." The present, however, if it lives at all, lives only in the mind of men who Involve themselves deeply in life. "The ephebe.../ seeks out/ The perquisites of sanctity."

His communion with the absolute is unschooled, unadulterated. "It is a fresh spiritual that he defines." He can see the difficulty in his pursuits: "The difficulty of the visible/ To the nations of the clear invisible." 278

The dry, myopic academician proceeds dauntlessly, however. "Pro­

fessor Eucalyptus of New Haven seeks" God "In New Haven with an eye

that does not look/ Beyond the object." Unable to see beyond the par­

ticular he thinks that God is contained within it. He fixes the ob­

ject with a "commodious adjective" which, for him makes the object

"divinity." Stevens’ notion of the object as having to point beyond

Itself toward God signifies, finally, that there can be no ultimate

poem wherein truth is contained and expressed as a thing eternally

present. To see any poem as ultimate, therefore, is to regard it as

Professor Eucalyptus regards the object.

Poor Professor Eucalyptus fails to understand God for yet another

reason: he is caught between the desire to have and have not: the de­

sires to know through seeing and the fear of the direct experience.

"Ihe instinct for heaven had its counterpart:/ The instinct for earth,

for New Haven, for his room." The dialectic of opposites— of the fear

of experience and the desire for knowledge— is resolved as "The hiber­

nal dark that hung/ In primavera, the shadow of bare rock/ Becomes the -

rock of autumn, glittering." The darkness begins to lift and "The heav­

iness we lighten by light will," by the return to lived experience,

"By the hand of desire, faint, sensitive, the soft/ Touch and trouble

of the touch of the actual hand" (my italics). It is through experienc­

ing the real rather than the desiccated concept, therefore, that the

dried old plant refreshed through rain, experience, and the present, is

brought back to life again. 279

The fusion of the beginning and the end, the "naked Alpha" and the "hierophant Omega" creates new life, vitality, power. The tragedy of experience and art, however, is that the beginning, the present, almost immediately becomes a part of the past; meaning and life evapor­ ate at the very moment the words which articulate and contain the lived experience are being uttered. As Pearce himself has so well formulated the problem:

It would follow that the "real" poem somehow is always behind the poet; that when the poet speaks of having spoken it, it too has already "gone back to be a thing about." But then how may we know—ras we do— that more poems will come? How can we be sure--as we are— that we can yet order our world into poems? How are we assured that there is an ultimate poem, before and not behind us, which will be an ever-fresh source of the poems we need, if we are to live fully as men? (p. 4o6).

Surely, furthermore, a poet who dreamed of writing the ultimate poem could not be content to create only the "possibility for poetry," and not feel anguish in seeing his own poems become part of the stale past.

Isn’t it rather that a poet who aspires to write the ultimate poem hopes that his poem will never belong to the past, but will endure eternally in the present? This, I suggest, was the grandiose achieve­ ment that Stevens yearned for. And it was a dream he realized would never be achieved. This is precisely the point that he is trying to make in poem XVIII. It is difficult, he writes, to be a painter of the present when one beholds outside one’s window a changeless scene which, in its changelessness, has already outlasted the freshness of its beginning. ...to paint

In the present state of painting and not the state ©f thirty years ago. It is looking out Of the vindov and vaIking in the street and seeing, As if the eyes vere the present or part of it, As if the ears heard any shocking sound, As if life and death were ever physical.

The painter seeks to realize the present completely and in that way

ecstatically to transcend it before it can beoome a thing of the past.

"A fuchsia in a can" for "this carpenter," this painter-god, is a matter

of death or salvation. Achieving the right fusion of colors, he auto­ matically guarantees his salvation. But those colors dreamed for, the

"iridescences/- Of petals...will never be realized,/ Things not yet true."

We see, then, that the drama of thiB rather tedious poem comes in the poet's yearning to locate the purest aspect of human experience in the present and to celebrate the present in the ultimate poem, where it will not grow stale in the past. What he is striving for is nothing so generous as merely "the possibility of poetry" for everyone. He knows full well thet the changingness of the world, the dialectic between the absolute and history as man is involved in it will always continue to produce poetry. But he is made miserable by the fear that the poems he has created as the final resting place of his mind are destined to be part of the past. What he strives for most of all is nothing less than a guarantee of his own infinitely continuing existence. His passionate and desperate desire for Immortality, and his bleak realization that he cannot in the last analysis believe in it: this constitutes the beauty and the drama of his final poems. 281

Were the fear of death and the desire for immortality not bo intense­ ly felt, then his certainty that he is destined to dissolve into a non­ human state vould not be overcast by feelings of anguish and loss. In­ deed, when the beatific vision of dehumanized beings is presented with­ out a feeling of loss as it is, for example, in parts of "An Ordinary

Evening," the poems are utterly dreary, tedious, dull. However, the theme of dissolution often evokes feelings of numbness, sadness, tragic loss as in, for example, The Auroras of Autumn,! where one bleak image of dissolution follows another. Bodies disintegrate, and finally even memory becomes a thing of the past.

He feels an ambivalence for the condition of disintegration. At times, he calls it blandly a state of beatitude. But at other moments that serene annihilation is for him loathesome because it requires that he lose his human powers, rather than perfect them. His goal was to contain human experience at its highest level of Intensity. He does not want himself subjected to the experience of death which will break down the body and the soul and squander the humanity that exists within. He is afraid of substituting his own being for another that is emasculated and insensate. He is searching, therefore, as he writes in "The Owl in the Sarcophagus" for a "mythology of modern death," for an afterlife in which he can believe, one furthermore that is not described by formal religion. His "Reply to Papini" (p. M*6), his reply to the church, is stark, unequivocal, tragic. It underscores his own spiritual agony, and his fierce determination to find God for himself: The poet

Increases the aspects of experience, As in an enchantment, analyzed and fixed

And final. This is the centre. The poet is The angry day-son clanging at its make:

The satisfaction underneath the sense, The conception sparkling in still obstinate thought.

At times, he conceives of the center as not constituting a particular point and a particular poem (the ultimate poem), but rather the idea

of a point and the idea of the ultimate poem. But in his more power­ ful poems, he tries to imagine himself as being at the very center, at a specific place, writing the ultimate poem which finally fuses the

idea and the particular into the holy, final synthesis of heaven and

earth. "It would be enough for him," he writes,

If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed In this Beautiful World of Ours and not as now,

Helplessly at the edge, enough to be Complete, because at the middle, if only in a sense, And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy (p. k30, italics mine). i The center is the only place to be if he wishes to survive. But he can­ not get to the center— no matter how furiously he strives in his final poems (especially in the excruciating detail of "An Ordinary Evening") to achieve the center by patching the either-or view of the world, the alpha and omega, the abstract and the.particular, the beginning and the end, into one vital whole that will be immortal. The most he is able to achieve is the vital particular— Juda and New Haven— that discovers the abstract in the particular of the instant. But he cannot extend the life of the particular beyond the present. 283

His weakest poems in this final section are reflections on the

steps one must take to arrive at the center. Those reflections predi­

cate the belief that if the steps are followed, the center can be gain­

ed. But his most powerful poems in Auroras of Autumn and The Rock

express his striving to arrive at the center, even as he acknowledges

full well that the center as he would like to imagine it— humanity,

the present abstracted unaltered into heaven— is impossible to achieve.

In "This Solitude of Cataracts" (p. k2k), he strives to sustain an emo­ tion, and in its changelessness and intensity to Imply that the ultimate, changeless state of being has indeed been achieved.

He wanted to feel the same way over and over.

He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way, To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it,

Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast. He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest

In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be,

Just to know how it would feel, released.from destruction, To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis,

Without the oscillations of planetary pass-pass, Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury centre of time.

His desire to believe in the perfection of humanity, not dissolved after death into nothingness, leads him at times to reject the beatific form for the immortal being:

Out of him I made Mai Bay ' And not a bald and tasselled saint (p. ^55).

In the poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" (p. 508), man's vision at the final moment of life magnifies the forms of the present instead of 281+

dissolving them into nothingness— so that with his last glimpse of the

world man heroically asserts his humanity:

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, the pillared porch, The book and candle in your ambered rooni,

Total grandeur of a total edifice Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. He shops upon this threshold, As if the design

In "The Planet on the Table" (p. 532), he seems to have accommodated

himself to the inevitable transitoriness of himself and his poetry:

It was not important that they survive, What mattered was that they should bear Some lineament of character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived, In the poverty of their words, Of the planet of which they were part.

But in "Study of Images I" (p. 1+63) it seems that Stevens* survival de­

pends upon the survival of those images:

If the study of his images Is the study of man, this image of Saturday

This Italian symbol, this Southern landscape, is like A waking, as in Images we awake Within the very object that we seek,

Participants of its being. It is, we are. He is, we are. Ah, bella.' He is, we are, Within the big blue bush and its vast shade

At evening and at night.

In the last analysis he cannot be certain whether that image (the poem) 285

1b alive or whether, in "the disintegration of afternoon" (p. 4 59), it too has not faded into "phantomerei."

This anguish of uncertainty, of not knowing whether the image is alive in human form or whether it is simply an illusion, is expressed in one of the most moving poems in The Rock: "The World as Meditation"

(p. 520). The poem begins with a question that gives rise to the never- ending meditation: "Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east," or is it not? Penelope, who awaits Ulysses, preparing herself for hiB per­ fecting, knows that "Someone," something "is moving/ On the horizon and lifting himself up above it." How she desires that being to be Ulysses.

How much she would desire to know with certitude that it is he, For,

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him, Companion to his self for her, which she imagined, Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

It was only he that she desired: "She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone./ She wanted no fetchings." Nothing besides him could suffice to satisfy her longing, to bring her peace and contentment.

Is it or is it not Ulysses? The ambiguity of uncertainty is maddening.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow?

"The thought kept beating in her like her heart." The agony is finally quieted when she comes to accept the fact that the meditation is des­ tined to be interminable. "It was Ulysses and it was not." The form does not turn out to be Ulysses; and yet it is, in a sense, for she has imagined his arrival. He is beside her and yet far away. She is con­ tent with the illusion (the idea) of his being and yet frustrated be­ cause she deslreB the real man. 2k must constitute for him: permanence, abstraction, pleasure, purity, change. The only thing he will call real must satisfy these criteria.

He comes to conceive of the poetic imagination as part of the immense imagination at the center of the universe which, since it cannot be de­ fined, exists for him as the highest abstraction closely associated with the idea of God. The poetic Imagination appears miraculously in the poem like a god "or as a god might be." Embodied in the human mind, it is the purest synthesis of the sensuous and the abstract.

The poet, knowing his role as part-man,part-god, attempts to express that mid-point between the sensuous and the non-sensuous, the imperfect and perfect realities. The sensuous forms he searches for must be noble and elegant to be worthy of expression in his poetry. So too must the audience which the poet addresses. For, as Stevens writes, the poet must be selective and speak to the elite: "...not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own, if there are enough of one's own to fill a gal­ lery" (N.A., p. 29). Although the poetic imagination, then, is tempted to speak only to a highly select audience, it must realize that art is to address a wide audience. The noble rider of Verrocchio, for example, is not appreciated today by large numbers of people; its limited appeal discloses an inherent failure to capture and sustain popular belief. In the eyes of the general public, the eloquence of the statue is only "a bit of uncommon panache, no longer quite the appropriate thing; outdoors." t Even though the imagination might seek elegant forms, reason will force it to surrender its beliefs if those forms remain austere, forbidding, 286

Yet they had met, Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement. The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair, Repeating his name with its patient syllables, Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly bo near.

It is the mind, then, never ceasing to desire love and life, that is the only source of strength. Penelope, with the strength of her ima­ gination, keeps waiting for Ulysses to return home.

This patience, this waiting, however, is perhaps the most happy moment she will experience. For in the end, as far as Stevens' final poems are concerned, when the imagined and the real come together as actual forms, it is a pathetic meeting between one person still strong and alive waiting for the one he loves. The being who returns to him turns out to be a sad ghost and the meditation of the man waiting for life ends tragically:

The day is great and strong-- But his father was strong, that lies now In the poverty of dirt.

Nothing could be more hushed than the way The moon moves toward the night. But what his mother was returns and cries on his breast (p. *53). Again and again in these poems in The Rock, Stevens rages against death and against all those who would comfort us with false myths of an after­ life. But yet, yearning for the myth that will release him from cer­ tain death, he too cries out:

Keep quiet in the heart, 0 wild bitch. 0 mind Gone wild, be what he tells you to be: Puella. Write pax across the window pane. And then Be still. The summarlum in excelsis begins . . . Flame, sound, fury composed . . . Hear what he says, The dauntless master, as he starts the human tale ,v, (p. *56). 287

In the end, however, there Is no final truth, no myth that he discovers beyond the fact that man is destined to die and that his destruction will be serene, 3fthere were a myth, he would have been the first to elaborate it. Instead, in the end he seems to believe that we are des­ tined simply to dissolve in thin air— together with all the forms of life and art, together with Satan and "many blue phenomena," to become a part of the stale past. This in not a consummation that is devoutly desired by Stevens, even though in some of his flat poems he seems to sanction it by failing to rage against it. But in his finest poems at the end of his career, with whatever strength he has left, he addresses his sad farewells to life:

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls In the afternoon, The proud and the strong Have departed.

Those that are left are the unaccomplished, The finally human, Natives of a dwindled sphere.

Their indigence is an indigence That is an Indigence of the light, A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

Little by little, the poverty Of autumnal space becomes A look, a few words spoken.

Each person completely touches us With what he is and as he is, In the stale grandeur of annihilation (p. 504).

In "The Rock", the tragedy of death having been partly absorbed, in the seventieth year of his life, he looks back at a time when he was born and when he was a young boy, thinking: I am no longer in the house of my youth; it no longer exists, therefore. And I myself no 288

longer exist in the soul of the boy who has long since become part of

the unreal past:

It is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air. . .

The lives these lived in the minds are at an end. They never were . . . The sounds of the guitar

Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken Were not and are not. It is not to be believed. (p. 525).

Remembrance of things past becomes a cruel, sad commentary on the past.

The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like

An invention, an embrace between one desperate clod And another in a fantastic consciousness, In a queer assertion of humanity.

"The Rock" is Stevens' final farewell to life. He has, it seems, accom­ modated himself to death in conceiving of his life as being both Impure and illusory. His only salvation now can come in the belief in his pure spirit abstracted from experience into the ultimate poem, which is im­ mortal.

The poem, he writes in "The Rock," is the "icon," the intercessor between man and the divine. And he himself is part of that poem. "The fiction of the leaves is the icon/ Of the poem, the figuration of bles­ sedness. The icon is the man." These simply statements at the end of a relatively brief poem, however, can hardly cancel out the despair -J ,

Stevens expressed in contending with his mortality and with his failure to write the ultimate poem. His belief in these statements in "The

Rock"— namely, that the human self is immortalized in the ultimate poem— was, I suggest, only half-hearted. Iti Jfa.B § belief he maintained mainly 289

because he had to anchor finally to something that would give him a

modicum of strength, a modicum of confidence in the world.

Throughout his career, he had to believe in the world, in the fact

that it exists. For he knew that if it exists, then he surely exists

also. He had to believe, in other words, in place. He had to believe

that there is a ground, no matter how pulverized it might became, upon

which he could depend, upon which he could stand. That is precisely

why the rock itself becomes the changing place in man's life, "the gray

particular of man's life,/ The stone from which he rises, up— and—

ho,/ The step to the bleaker depths of his descents. . . " and also

"the stern particular of the air." For it is the rock itself which provides the staircase to God. Resting firmly upon it, he could believe

that one day, completing the ascent, he would be able,if not to write, at least to behold the ultimate poem. CONCLUSION

God as Epistemologist and Dreamer

Stevens' final poems tend to affirm as the highest reality a state

of being dehumanized, de-personalized, stripped altogether of form and body,-- existing timeless and indestructible. However acceptable to the reason this state might have been, it was never unequivocally accept­ able to Stevens, whose desire to survive as a human being was very power­ ful. Stevens both believed and disbelieved in that final state of being, the true abstraction; he believed in it, in as much as his reason told him that abstraction, and not the supreme fiction, was authentic. And yet he disbelieved in it, since he could not sanction it; for to affirm it enthusiastically would have signified that he was willing to pay the price it entailed: loss of body, mind, and art.

His final poems— indeed all of his poems— reveal the struggle to believe in abstraction and the fear of believing in it. Because to the very end of his career he was tormented by the fear of dying, the con­ flict never ceased to trouble him. Logically he was convinced about a truth he was loath to accept: that there is no perceptible continuity between earth and heaven. He expressed this fear in one of the "Three

Academic Exercises" in The Necessary Angel. It is the same fear that torments the lady in "Sunday Morning." Stevens* decision to try to be­ lieve what he feared to believe— namely in a bleak afterlife— accounts for the major changes reflected in his art. He evolves from concerns that are humanistic to those that are strictly spiritual and therefore for him inevitably anti-humanistic. The rejection of life, of sensuous reality, of romantic love, of a narcissistic vision of paradise begins

290 291 in Harmonium. In Ideas of Order he begins emphatically to renounce art.

Here his scrupulous and relentless testing of art signals the begin­ ning of the end of his dream to create a religion •which humanizes the absolute.

His growing concern came to be not with the manifestations of the sensuous world but with realities which he believed exist within those manifestations. Relentlessly he stripped away artifice in his zeal to discover what lay beneath surfaces. He corroded the unity of the mind to reveal the imagination and reason at loggerheads-- metamorphosed into monster (reason, reality), angel (imagination), and abstraction (a syn­ thesis of angel and monster). Repudiating the manifestations of forces, he celebrated the naked force alone. Finally in his search for basic human laws in the universe, he evolved a myth which receives fullest ex­ pression in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthetique duMal," and

"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven."

Reason and Imagination, as I have observed, are opposing forces in his poetry. In "Sunday Morning" the lady's narcissistic vision of para­ dise is curbed by reason, which austerely chastens her wishes. Stevens himself came to believe that to envision paradise, one had to conceive of the dissolution of everything human. In his early poems, however, fulfillment was often conceived of narcissistically. In "The Man with the Blue Guitar" the austere dehumanization that a vision of paradise came to express for him is violently forecast by the monster which in his later poems becomes an integral part of the angel. In "An Ordinary

Evening in New Haven" man, reduced by the event of death, becomes a de- 292

humanized "being who is fulfilled solely from the perspective of those

non-human beings in paradise, even as he is from the perspective of

human beings on earth utterly annihilated.

"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" fails poetically in those sec­

tions which describe first the state of being beyond time and second,

the relation between man and his angelic double. Referring to the

timeless and the temporal as "naked Alpha" and "hierophant Omega,"

Stevens transforms the bleak and magnificent tale of our origins and

our destiny into a bedtime story for children. Indeed, this slightly frivolous account of our genesis in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" glosses over facts that most of the time Stevens faces grimly. In this same light manner, he relates the myth of Adam's fall in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." But in this poem the air of Improvisation

is sustained, since, after "The Idea of Order at Key West,11 the image

of being that he was able to achieve is benevolent. In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" it is paradise and not earth that is Imperfect, since heaven gives rise to boredom. Revelation is much too easily achieved at the very beginning of this long poem. And finally abstraction it­

self is defined as both the "inconceivable idea" of a particular and at the same time the particular itself. How it comes to be both con­ currently in this poem is not clarified; but in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" Stevens attempts to determine in what way abstraction and particular may be harmonized, only to conclude sadly that the union be­ tween them can be sustained for a single moment. In "Notes toward a

Supreme Fiction" the benevolent vision is amenable to belief only be- 293 cause onedesires to sanction it. But the real myth of man for Stevens is expressed in "Esth/tique du Mai."

In "The Man with the Blue Guitar" the angel confronts the monster as antagonist. But angel and monster are joined in "Esthetique du Mai" as the instinct for self-perfection (the desire to purify self into angel) comes to he identical with the instinct for rebellion and anni­ hilation (the instinctual Satanic passion to be the genius of evil).

In his final poems Stevens is terrified by the thought that he must die and yet he realizes that death is the sole means of achieving perfection.

This conflict of desires— the desire for perfection and the pas­ sion to destroy— is manifested in Stevens* efforts to create a work of art that will be intercessor between man and the absolute. He relent­ lessly chastened art to purify it— chastened it so much in fact that little by little, even as he was prophesying great things for man and for art, art itself in his vision of the universe was ceasing to exist.

His desire to affirm art came in Parts of a World to be qualified deep­ ly by his desire to destroy all intermediaries between himself and the absolute: to destroy authority, sensuous forms, all gross imperfections, to annul the body and the mind so that he could achieve a perception of

"pure being." To the end of his life he did not know what a view of the absolute would disclose. In fact, he was not even certain whether or not it would disclose anything at all. He was tormented by the am­ biguity inherent in a divided view of the highest reality: was abstrac­ tion (as highest reality) something, or was it indeed nothing at all?

He had to believe that abstraction was a real state of being; otherwise Ii 29^

it would have been for him the cruelest irony to sacrifice everything for abstraction only to discover that in the end he had destroyed him­

self for something that does not even exist. At times he strives to make sure that the absolute exists by saying that he has perceived it.

In "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" he is content to imagine that he has perceived the absolute with an inner eye. For him sight in this passage and in several poems in Transport to Summer is translated into

revelation; yet someone who really achieves revelation no longer needs to depend upon the faculty of sight as the means of proving that heaven

exists. Stevens never relinquished his dependence upon what he could

see manifested sensuously before him. He desired to have paradise de­ scribed for him as a concrete place, as ground upon which he would stand.

He desired furthermore to conceive of himself bodily transported into paradise. And in "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas" and "Esthetique du Mai," he even tried to conceive of a purely physical being in paradise, one without mind, and, therefore, non-human, but all

the while perfected, even as it seemed more logical to him that after death, if he would survive at all, he would be a non-human, non-physical being— a being as abstraction, but not as nothingness.

He was unwilling in the last analysis to accept an either-or view

of paradise: the absolute conceived either humanistically or non-human-

istically. Even bo, he could never determine precisely how the two were

related. Nonetheless his demand to achieve at least the illusion of the double vision— the vision of man and the vision of abstraction— was fulfilled consummately in "Sunday Morning" and "Esthetique du Mai." The 295 voice that Intones with grim wisdom: " 'The tomb in Palestine/ Is not

the porch of spirits lingering./ It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.from nownere intones, at another time, "Pain is human./ Except for us, Vesuvius might consume/ In solid fire the utmost earth and know/ No pain (ignoring the cocks that crow us up/ To die)." Vocallisi- mus in both poems is Stevens, or rather it is the suggestion of a puri­ fied being, the omniscient mind of Stevens abstracted from the real be­ ing who might resemble less the ideal than he resembles the lady in the poem and the connoisseur of pain at Naples. The angelic and austere tone in those poems is echoed in a poem written at the very end of his career: "It is an illusion that we were ever alive," and "The sounds of the guitar/ Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken/ Were not and are not. It is not to be believed." "It" is his own life that seems so far removed from him that he cannot even believe that it ever occurred. As past beliefs were destined, as he wrote again and again, to become outmoded, as art was bound to become a thing of the past, as the present is destined to last only a fraction of an instant, so his own past is no longer believable, because no longer capable of being ex­ perienced. The only thing he can believe in is the present. And it is not the present .of intense fulfillment, but rather the awareness of how little he really mattered, how little he finally came to in the end, how futile is the thought of the end as the accumulation of experience. The mind does not avariciously accumulate any wealth. Instead memory is a seive through which in a pitiful waste flow all our experiences, so that little by little we come to nothing "in the stale grandeur of annihilation!1 THE ANNIHILATION OF ART IN THE POETHT OF WALLACE STEVENS

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Georgianna Wuletich Lord, B.S., A.M.

♦ttKXXtt

The Ohio State University 1962

Approved by

Adviser Department of English 25 aristocratic, intimidating. For since everyone must be able to share in those forms, the noble rider of Verrocchio is far too noble to en­ dure.

Yet democracy itself, which forces all men to conceive of themselves as equal to each other, cannot produce an image of nobility. For, if

Verrocchio's statue was too forbiding and magnificent, the statue of

General Jackson by Clark Mills is much too banal. Its lack of nobility makes it unreal for Stevens:

There is in Washington, in Lafayette Square, which is the square on which the White House faces, a statue of Andrew Jackson, riding a horse with one of the most beau­ tiful tails in the world. General Jackson is raising his hat in a gay gesture saluting the ladies of his genera­ te tion. One looks at this work of Clark Mills and thinks of the remark of Bertrand Russell that to acquire immu­ nity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the cit­ izens of a democracy. We are bound to think that Col- leoni, as a mercenary, was a much less formidable man than General Jackson, that he meant less to fewer people and that, if Verrodchio could have applied his prodigious poetry to Jackson, the whole American outlook today might be imperial (N.A., p. 10).

Belief therefore is possible only in things that are beautiful, pure, and friendly and familiar, but not intimidating and aristocratic.

Again, Stevens' ideal effects a fusion of opposites: that art express both the aristocratic and the democratic, that it be addressed to the elite but all the while invite everyone to share in its forms. The at­ tempt to fuse the elegant and the commonplace, his major preoccupation in"Parts of a World,” expresses Stevens' hope to fuse two levels of reality: the sensuous, anti-poetic, drab, ugly, monstrous; and the non-sensuous, beautiful, elegant, divine. Put concisely, it is the at­ tempt to fuse two visions of life: that which conceives of reality as something harsh and destructive, and that which sees reality as the ex- 296

Stevens has written that the poet responds to the world as a lover; he seizes the world like Don Juan absorbing it into "his especi­ al eye," and he releases love in bounteous gestures. To contain and to liberate requires an enormous act of vitality which perforce stirs feelings of pride. The final poems in The Rock reveal a mind that is

through with loving, with taking the world a captive, with giving of himself generously to the world. They reveal too, the quality of a mind that is through with writing poetry and even through with existing distinctly as a mind which thinks of ideas. For now Stevens is inter­ ested in the poem he put at the end of his collected poems, "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself."

Once again at the end of his career he returns to things that fas­ cinated him at the very beginning of his career in such poems as "Thir­ teen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "Six Significant Landscapes," in "Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetary" and later in 'faontrachet-le- jardin." He listens not to the big booming sounds of the "peanut parody" nor to the soldiers marching off to war— sounds vulgar or heroic— but rather to those so thin, so bleak, so uncelebrated and anonymous that they are not attended to by anyone. The sounds of nobility are not gold­ en tones but the "scrawny cry" of a blackbird— a cry reduced to an al­ most abstract "C".

Even in his early poems he was curious not about monolithic surfaces and imposing sights, but rather delicate nuances of color and movement of frail objects and sounds. Though in Parts of a World he plunged into the stream of hectic activity, there was always a part of him that ab­ 297 stracted itself from the rush of events to attend to nuances of sensa­ tion-- not from an epicurean desire to savor sounds and pleasures, hut rather to discover those things that were invisible to the gross per­ ceptions and thereby to work his way step by step toward things increa­ singly imperceptible, in the hope of apprehending substances and forms invisible to the naked eye. It was the scarcely perceptible link be­ tween "the" and "an” that he celebrated in "Extracts from Addressesoto the Academy of Fine Ideas" and the moving eye of the blackbird and the

"eccentric," the "base of design," the unpredictable and fragile nuance of motion in "Six Significant Landscapes." The minute meant so much to him because he hoped that it would prove to him that abstraction was not a state of nothingness, but that there existed some ultimate sub­ stance, no matter how rarefied, and that such a substance constituted pure abstraction. It is the belief beyond belief in abstraction as the most rarefied substance to be manifested that he strove to sustain.

Abstraction was to be achieved not through theorizing but through direct­ ly experiencing with the senses rarefied levels of reality.

A direct perception of reality is the subject of that final poem in his collected works. The sound of the bird’s cry is "Still far away."

There is no uncertainty in his own mind as to whether or not it exists.

But one wonders whether in hearing the sound alone Stevens implies that he had achieved a revelation of the absolute, "a new knowledge of real­ ity"? If so, then the distance between object and subject in this final poem would break down with the mind, tranqullized, miraculously becoming one with the perceived. In the state of intensest inactivity and atten- tiveness, man finally seems to establish a relationship with "something

other" that is built upon neither pride nor passion.

The union between himself and "something other" in the end is only

intimated but never achieved. For the cry of the bird merely "seemed

like a sound in his mind" (my italics). And it was merely "like/ A new knowledge of reality." The closest Stevens could come to perceiving

the absolute, therefore, was not through revelation, but through illusion

the illusion of identity, unity, abstraction, the vague intimation of the absolute. As the highest reality is expressed and known by Stevens only as an illusion, his loftiest goal was to achieve, as he wrote about

Valery's "Eupalinos," a "state of mind equivalent to an illusion." This meant, of course, a state of mind abstracted, remote, immune to destruc­ tion. It is that state of being abstracted, of being God as epistemolo- gist and dreamer, that he has achieved intermittently throughout his career. Indeed, one of the firmest desires sustained to the end of his life was to abstract himself from the grossly imperfect "pressures of reality," so that he could experience not nothingness, but an intimation of abstraction as that state of being at one with the universe, as an intense mental activity on the most rarefied plane of existence. There he would commune not with those pressing about him, but rather with

"something other" which is also abstracted from human concerns: whether that would happen to be with his own ideas, or with the ideal Susanna, or with the idea of God, or whether it would be with the uncelebrated

"the" and "an," or with the eye of the blackbird. If one were to judge the scene for himself, he would suspect that nothing was happening. But 299 the poet, who looks on the same scene, reveals that the immobile sur­ faces are deceptive; for the mind is engaged in an intensely private, intensely tranquil perception. It searches for the smallest common denominator between man and the world. Because that detail is not especially valued by a "peanut people," there is no need to celebrate it publicly; because it is austerely simple, there is no need mawkishly . to inflate it; because it exists only when experienced, there is no need even "plainly to propound" it.

If ever Stevens came close to apprehending the absolute and to be­ coming himself an abstraction, it was because his basic Instinct led him to desire to be abstracted, distracted, to escape from the "pressures of reality." For him purity in the end involved not intensifying human emotions, but rather purifying himself of them, reducing them, calming himself sufficiently so as to permit immediate and spontaneous identifi­ cation with the basic force in the universe that unites all things. The search for nobility ends, therefore, almost where it begins: with the perception of nuances. The desire for omniscience, for abstraction from reality, is achieved in "The Rock," as the past is seen with a mind so detached that the mind itself seems to be unreal, illusory. Illusion as a state of mind expresses the closest Stevens ever came to conceiving of the absolute non-humanistically. For the intimation of heaven that he implies he has achieved makes him sublimely indifferent to everything he experienced on earth. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackmur, Richard. Language as Gesture. New York, 1935,

Kermode, Frank. Wallace StevenB. Edinburgh, i960.

O ’Connor, William Van. The Shaping Spirit, a study of Wallace Stevens. Chicago, 1950.

Pack, Robert. Wallace Stevens: An Approach to his Poetry and Thought. New Brunswick, 1955*

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton, 1961.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York, 1955*

______. The Necessary Angel. New York, 1951.

______. Opus Posthumous. ed. Samuel French Morse. New York, 1957.

Tindall, William York. Wallace Stevens. Minneapolis, 1961.

Wilson, Edmund. The Shores of Light. New York, 1952.

300 I AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I, Georgianna Wuletich Lord, was born in Gary, Indiana, May 6 ,

1931* I received my secondary school education in the public schools of Gary, Indiana. In 1953* I received my Bachelor of Science degree at Northwestern University and in 195^# a diplome from the University of Lyon, where I studied for a year under a Fulbright grant. There­

upon in 1955t I received my Master of Arts degree from the University

of Chicago. From 1955 to 1958* I completed nearly all the residence

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The Ohio State

University, while I held a position of assistant. In 1957* 1 received a university fellowship. I accepted an instructorship at Los Angeles

State College in September, 1958; in 1959* shortly after I was married,

I was an instructor of English and French at Southern Connecticut State

College in New Haven, and assistant to Professor Frederick Hilles at

Yale University. In late i960, I returned to The Ohio State University

to complete my dissertation, while I held a position as assistant in­

structor.

I have accepted a position as Instructor in English at Queens

College.

301 pression of our greatest dreams of beauty and nobility. Verrocchio's

noble rider, therefore, cannot suffice as a model for the artist, not

merely because it belongs to the past, but more important because it is

far too aristocratic. Clark Mills' statue, on the other hand, cannot

inspire in Stevens' any admiring response because it is far too democra­

tic. Although no form in the past can suffice for Stevens to express the

demands of the present, there is one form, he believes, that comes closer

to his notion of reality than do either of these two. It is, of course,

Don Quixote, the fantastic dreamer who forced his unreal vision upon a

real, rustic, crude world, and thereby resolved the disparity between the

aristocrat and the peasant.

Justice, truth and equilibrim. It is Cervantes, then, who achieves

a balancing of imagination and reality: "With Cervantes, nobility was a

thing of the imagination. It was a part of reality,...Cervantes sought

to set right the balance between the Imagination and reality." Stevens

believes that restoring an inherent part of reality, the commonplace,

gives us pleasure; formas it were^the doors of art are cast open to

everyone. But the danger, of course, is that "We may derive so much

satisfaction from the restoration of reality as to become wholly pre­

judiced against the imagination." If we turn our backs to the imagina­ tion, we lose all hope of surviving, of achieving nobility. Therefore, although art cannot be intimidating, cannot cut off all bonds with the commonplace, the mundane, the sensuous world, it dare not lose sight of

its highest end: that it express our instinct for nobility. In "The

Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet," a voice echoes the plea for purity: 27

11 1 I am the truth, since I am part of what is real,... I am imagination,

in a leaden time and in a world that does not move for the weight of its

own heaviness* " (N.A., p. 63). How, then, achieve in our time the forms

of nobility and the commonplace that Cervantes created for his?

Rather than answer this question immediately, Stevens attempts to

determine the price the poet will pay if he fails to achieve a balance between the imagination and reality. Art which satisfies either the

imagination or reality without satisfying both at the same time may ex­ press a vision that is destructive and extremist: "The man who has been brought up in an artificial school becomes intemperately real. The

Mallarmiste becomes the proletarian novelist" (O.P., p. 221). Culti­ vating artificial gardens, the poet labors under self-imposed depriva­ tions; he comes to realize that he cannot tolerate them and, seeking relief, destroys in a sudden violence the vision he achieves and then looks for solace in the "intemperately real." Violent change cannot reveal a contemplative and ripe mind. Leaving one school, the artiste- manqu^ incessantly turnB to new beginnings, to repeated artistic abor­ tions. How well this describes Stevens' comic hero in the poem "The

Comedian as the Letter C': Crispin's sense of resolution is a bumbling accommodation to his inability to endure life at either extreme.

In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," Stevens explores some of the destructive implications of reality and the imagination when either exists independent of the other:

Take the statement made by Bateson that a language, con­ sidered semantically, evolves through a series of conflicts between the denotative and the connotative forces in words; 28 between an asceticism tending to kill language by strip­ ping words of all association and a hedonism tending to kill language by dissipating their sense in a multiplicity of associations (N.A., p. 13).

For Stevens, the connotative use of words implies a hedonistic reveling

in the "multiplicity of associations." The denotative use of words, on

the other hand, austerely limits meanings. Both uses of language in poetry achieve a resolution between reality, checking the imagination,

and the imagination, hedonistically seeking pleasure in beautiful and

noble emotions. To use language denotatively or connotatively would

disturb the balance between the imagination and reality and thereby lead the artist to favor either asceticism or hedonism. No such disturbance,

Stevens seems to feel, is in the character of our time; for the tendency

is, in fact, toward both the denotative and the connotative. In matters of language, for example, Stevens notes that Joyce is "wholly connota­ tive"; and "the interest in the subconscious and in surrealism shows the tendency toward the imagination." At the same time, the influence of science in the works of Joyce, Braque, and Picasso demonstrated their afr finity to austere definition: "To the extent that this painting and this music are the work of men who regard it as part of ijjhe science of paint­ ing and the science of music it is the work of realists."

Although Stevens concedes that Braque and Picasso have achieved a remarkable balance of the imagination and reality in their manipulation of connotation and denotation, that equilibrium in itself is no guarantee that either has achieved an image of nobility. Indeed, for Stevens their work fails because it does not eaqpress love; that failure is all the 29

more acute because "the tendency...toward the connotative" in their art

would lead one to expect their art to reveal love:

Busoni said, in a letter to his wife, "I have made the painful discovery that nobody loves and feels music." Very likely, the. reason there is a tendency in language toward the connotative today is that there are many who love it and feel it. It may be that Braque and Picasso love and feel painting and that Schonberg loves and feels music, although it seems that what they love and feel is something else (N.A., pp. 15-16).

If an artist is to help people live their lives, he must be "un amoureux

perpetuel of the world that he contemplates and thereby enriches." His

concern must not be to justify or understand his existence, but to enjoy

it. In reality he finds an image of himself. Like the poet, he loves

the world because it agrees with him, greets reality therefore not as an

antagonist. But as a lover he takes it as a bride, abstracting both

himself and her from "the pressures of reality" so that they can enjoy a

hallowed existence in a "radiant and productive atmosphere," where "fi­

nally. . .everything like a firm grasp of reality is eliminated from the aesthetic field."

"The spirit of negation"-- of antagonism, suspicion, resistance to

reality— almost destroys the possibility of art. Indeed, the cruellest blow is delivered by the finest thinkers of our time, who would in their

speculations cripple and debase the imagination rather than exalt it:

"We turn to a recent translation of Kierkegaard and we find him saying:

'A great deal has been said about poetry reconciling one with existence; rather it might be said that it arouses one against existence; for poetry is unjust to men...it has use only for the elect, but that is a poor sort of reconciliation...1 " He writes about Freud: 30

Boileau's remark that Descartes had cut poetry's throat is a remark that could have been made respecting a great many people during the last hundred years, and of no one more apt­ ly than of Freud, who, as it happens, was familiar with it and repeats it in his 'Future of an Illusion.' The object of that essay was to suggest a surrender to reality. His pre­ mise was that it is the unmistakable character of the present situation not that the promises of religion have become smaller but that they appear less credible to people (N.A., p. 15).

For Freud and Pascal, illusion and imagination are deceptive and there­ fore potentially harmful. For Stevens, however, the imagination cannot be condemned, simply because it cannot be known and defined in the first place. Indeed it is beyond good and evil. Since, nevertheless, our sal­ vation comes through images of nobility created by the imagination, we must have faith that the imagination is good and not evil, that it will create and not destroy. Our survival and confidence in ourselves and in the world requires that we have faith in the inherent beauty and good­ ness and truth of the imagination. That is why, for Stevens, the man who believes that life and the imagination are antagonists sins in the grossest manner. For life is not struggle between the imagination and reality. We must believe therefore that the dialectic, the "illogical complication," between those friendly opposites, is the very principle of life.

The tranquil antagonist. As I have already observed, in spite of

Stevens' view of art and life as an "illogical complication," he deliber­ ately prefers not to bonceive of opposites as in a state of constant con­ flict, but rather as in the process of coming together peacefully. Fusion of concepts into harmonious whole was, for him, possible if the definition of each concept was not so rigid as to imply that it could not be quali­ fied by other meanings. The definition of each term — the boundaries 31

which confine the meanings of each concept-- was to be subtilized so as

to permit penetration by other meanings. In its most ideal sense, there*

fore, dialectics for Stevens is a peaceful, one might almost say, a bland affair. Commenting on the conflict between reason and the imagi­

nation that Freud and Pascal maintain exists, Stevens writes:

Only the reason stands between it (the imagination) and the reality for which the two are engaged in a struggle. We have no particular interest in this struggle because we know that it will continue to go on and that there will never be an outcome. We lose sight of it until Pascal, or someone else, reminds us of it. We say that it is merely a routine and the more we think about it the less able we are to see that it has any heroic aspects or that the spirit is at stake or that it may involve the loss of the world. Is there in fact any struggle at all and is the idea of one merely a bit of academic junk? Do not the two carry on together in the mind like two brothers or two sisters or even like young Darby and young Joan? Darby says, 'It is often true that what is most rational appears to be most imaginative, as in the case of Picasso.* Joan replies 'It is often true, also, that what is most imaginative appears to be most rational, as in the case of Joyce. Life is hard and dear and it is the hardness that makes it dear' (N.A., p. 1^1). * . - Attack, opposition, conflict, struggle: these are the taboos of a man who is deathly afraid of "reactions and reforms." As in politics, so in art Stevens is a conservative in his loathing of revolutionary changes that spring from an unleashed hatred and repudiation of the past. His own renunciation of the past is loving. Mo6t of his criticism is oblique, quiet, restrained, cautious. His sustained dislike is reserved only for

Picasso, Freud, Pascal, and Kierkegaard— all of whom, Stevens writes, conceive of reality and art engaged in savage contest for superiority.

He attacks these men primarily because he believes that they see life as ceaseless, bitter warfare. In his prose, Stevens constantly asserts 32 the need for a non-violent view of reality, one which inspires calm con­ fidence rather than hysteria. There are moments, nevertheless, when his own pessimism and desperation belie the strength of those feelings. In

’’The Noble Rider...,” he writes with grim insistence that every thing he observes around him bears evidence to the fraSLty of man's chances for survival:

The mind is being pressured by forces which threaten to destroy it. We are confronting...a set of events, not only beyond our power to tranquillize them in the mind, beyond our power to reduce them and metamorphose them, but events that stir the emotions to violence, that engage us in what is direct and immediate and real, and events that involve the concepts and sanctions that are the order of our lives and may involve our very lives; and these events are oc- curing persistently with increasing omen, in what may be called our presence (N.A., p. 22).

Ensnared by new events, by our proliferating domestic and international entanglements, we try to find our way through the maze of "an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence." Democratization has added to the incoherence and senseless perpetual motion by making education and a better standard of living available to more people who, living in mam­ moth housing projects, close in upon each other's privacy and peace: "

"There is no distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are intimate with us." We have become increasingly desensitized to things that should shock us: "Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces." We have lost our capacity to respond, reacting to events

"merely as goings-on." Our feelings have dwindled and deadened: "They 33

(the workers) have become, at their work, in the face of the machines, something approximating an abstraction, an energy. The time must be coming when, as they leave the factories, they will be passed through an air-chamber or a bar to revive them for riot and reading’1 (N.A., p. 19)* The spiritual state of the world, then, has deteriorated so rapidly that the mind has lost its power to take note of, much less to conprehend, all the events occurring without pause. But the question is not whether the mind can control anything apart from itself. It is much more desperate than that: can the mind still claim to have any control over itself?

The diagnosis is quite simple: events, occuring with maddening speed, pound the mind into a heavy slab of concrete. The way out is not to expect the mind to assert itself in the face of those events, but to replace an abnormal reality with a normal reality? "resistance to the pressure of ominous and destructive circumstance consists of its conversion, so far as possible, into a different, an explicable, an amenable circumstance" (0.P., p. 225). Events are to be slowed down, so that the mind's motion can be resuscitated. "Bergson des­ cribes the visual perception of a motionless object as the most stable of internal states" (N.A., pp. 2U-25). Though the object remains mo­ tionless, the mind is alive, moving from one angle of vision to another, so that "The subject-matter of poetry" and painting alike "...is not that 'collection of solid, static objects extended in space1 but the life that is lived in the scene that it composes; and so reality is not that external scene but the life that is lived in it." Rather than provide the static point at which the mind comes to a dead end, Stevens

"believed that the poet must initiate in the mind of the reader a cease­

less activity.

Through poetry, the qjind is made tranquil and stable; it is also

infinitely sensitized so that it feels the tremulation of delicate ob­ jects . Language, which mediates between fixity (definition) and exter­ nal motion ( a multiplicity of associations), mirrors the stability and motion of the mind. Poetry provides the "nature” of the term which

"proliferates its own special senses," uttered by no one except the poet, who has abstracted himself, the reality he loves and the audience who can receive his poems and love them, from the "pressure of events" into a heavenly sphere where everything resembling the imperfect disappears. What remains is the power of nobility expressed in the words of the poet, the

"supreme use of language." The sounds of nobility express higher and purer realities whose echoes, remote, among "dithering presences," the poet one day will hear.

The diagnosis of our times is completed in "The Noble Rider and the

Sound of Words." It is an essay which begins with a plea for nobility, a cry that does not die out but issues strongly and bravely into a form­ less burst of evergy: "It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without." In "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,"

Stevens demonstrates that the violence of the imagination can be a life- giving power. For him it becomes sacred and pure, like the idea of God.

And therefore in a quiet and intense affirmation, he ends with an in- cantatory address to the imagination, personified by "the inexplicable sister of the Minotaur." It is at once a petition, a betrothal, and ’’That there lies at the end of thought A foyer of the spirit in a landscape Of the mind, in which we sit And wear humanity's bleak crown."

----- "Crude Foyer"

ii 35

a prophecy of things which are to come:

’Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask, although I am part of what is real, hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal. I am the truth but the truth of that imagination of life in which with familiar motion and manner you guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine yours’ (N.A., p. 67).

Narcissus and "The Priest of the Invisible"

In the preceding pages, I have delineated the central principles of

Stevens' philosophy of art, focussing especially upon (l) the relation­

ship between reality and the imagination, and (2) the force and the forms

of nobility. I spoke briefly of Stevens 1 theory of language and his sen­

timents as benign antagonist. I shall return to his theory of language

in the following chapter, in dealing with his poetics. At this point I

define in great detail the human values that poetry must express for Ste­

vens. Ihe philosophical commitments remain essentially unchanged through­

out his career. But his growth as a human being constantly modifies and

enlarges them. As he writes in Adagia, "Poets acquire humanity" (O.P.,

p. 170).

The principle that stands at the core of his art is an aesthetic

•version of the pleasure principle.

...Narcissus did not expect, when he looked in the stream, to find in his hair a serpent coiled to strike, nor, when he looked in his own eyes there, to be met by a look of hate, nor, in general, to discover himself at the center of an inexplicable ugliness from which he would be bound to avert himself. On the contrary, he sought out his im­ age everywhere because it was the principle of his nature 36 to do so and, to go a step beyond that, because it was the principle of his nature, as it is of ours, to expect to find pleasure in what he found. Narcissism, then in­ volves something beyond the prime sense of the word. It involves, also, this principle, that as we seek out our resemblances we expect to find pleasure in doipgso; that is to say, in what we find. So strong is that expectation that we find nothing else (N.A., pp. 79-80).

The poet has "la confiance.. .au monde," as one trusts his parents and receives their love (O.P., p. 200), but he generously extends love to others. In Stevens' love poems, love does not remain at the poten­ tially anti-poetic level of lust. The poet-lover rescues his beloved, the reality he adores, from the corruption that threatens to destroy her, and purifies her so that she becomes an earthly madonna. Although

Narcissism implies self-absorption, the poet soon comes to extend his love to something other. He loves himself as he is reflected in reality.

His view, Schiller and Thomas Mann might have said, is healthy. For he is like the naive poet whose robust health enables him to adore the world, and unlike the sentimental poet whose first conflict with reality is measured by nearly fatal disease and frailty in childhood. Stevens him­ self writes: "Poetry is health" (O.P., p. 1?6). The virile poet, he observes, is quite different from the metaphysician. Without much com­ ment, Stevens wryly permits William James to speak about his lot: "Most of them (i.e., metaphysicians) have been invalids. I am one, can't sleep, can't make a decision, can't buy a horse, can't do anything that benefits a man; and yet you say from my photograph that I must be a second General Sherman, only greater and betterJ All right.' I love you for the fond delusion" (N.A., pp. 58-59)*

The poet, then, loves himself, his youth and virility. But love is 37 nourished when he selects a mate. "Apoet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman" (O.F., p. 165). Though this statement is true at all times, it is especially true when he is young, for then "The body is the great poem" (O.P., p. 168). Driven hy all kinds of wild desires,

"The imagination" like the body "wishes to be indulged" (O.P., p. 159)> but, as he grows older, "The poet is the priest of the invisible" (O.P., p. 169), arid "God is the postulate of the ego" (O.P., p. 171).

His first relationship with the earth is no more annulled than is his love for his parents, or his love for his wife. Nevertheless, the mind cannot be content, as he writes again and again. It aspires eternally toward increasingly pure realities until it comes to the purest one of all; God, or, in the absence of God, the ascent to God. "If the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea, then the idea of the ascent into heaven is only a little below it" (O.P., p. 193). The direction is up­ ward, like the spreading of wings as a bird is about to fly, or a rock strenuously mounted against the sky. Inspiration is aroused through the summons of the instinct of nobility; aspiration is action in re­ sponse to that summons; fulfillment comes when the plea for nobility, instead of dying out, is sustained in a hymn of joy so that "In this state of elevation we feel perfectly adapted to the idea that moves and l'oiseau qui chante" (N.A., p. 51).

Aspiration that leads to no fulfillment inevitably issues in deple­ tion and depression. This is precisely why Stevens attempts to find what will "suffice" to fulfill him. Without fulfillment there can be no happiness, no pleasure, in a word, no life. "Happiness is acquisition" 38

he writes in Adagia (O.P., p. 157)* Fulfillment comes through exper­

iencing art: ’’Anyone who has read a long poem day after day, as for ex­

ample, 'The Faerie Queene,1 knows how the poem comes to possess the

reader and how it naturalizes him in his own imagination and literates

him there.” It comes also to the poet in the "experience of writing a

poem that completely accomplishes his purpose: "The poet who experi­

ences what was once called inspiration experiences both aspiration and

inspiration. But that is not a difference, for it is clear that Berg­

son intended to include in aspiration not only desire but the fulfill­

ment of desire, not only the petition but the harmonious decree.” With

great enthusiasm, he describes that fulfillment:

...if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feelings of deliver­ ance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free— if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in hea­ ven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or cere­ monial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation (N.A., pp. 50-51)•

He adds somewhat apologetically: "This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter." But he means to exaggerate, for exaggeration intensifies his joy:

The way a poet feels when he is writing, or after he has written, a poem that completely accomplishes his purpose is evidence of the personal nature of his activity. To describe it by exaggerating it, he shares the transfor­ mation, not to say apotheosis, accomplished by the poem. It must be this experience that makes him think of poetry as possibly a phase of metaphysics; and it must be this 39 experience that teases him with that sense of the possibil­ ity of a remote, a mystical vis or noeud vital to which reference has already been made.

As he seeks fulfillment, he seeks to give pleasure also; indeed, his pleasure depends upon satisfying others. He desires neither to exploit nor to confine. Though love is initially narcissistic, he has no desire to confine the world in his image. Love, therefore, is not possessive and destructive, but liberating and creative. Although he recognizes the resemblances between himself and reality, he never insists that they be identical: "The more intensely one feels something that one likes the more one is willing for it to be what it is (N.A., p. 175)• His un­ willingness to define and fix the identity of something apart from him­ self recalls his fear of rigidly defining any term. The desire to li­ berate by conceiving of a poetry so pure that it evokes "feelings of deliverance... so that all men may know the truth and the truth may set them free," is a profoundly religious sentiment. Yet there are no ex­ plicit moral and religious comments, as we know, in his prose and poetry.

In fact, he claims that ethics have nothing whatsoever to do with art.

But moral sentiments implied in his belief in freedom have provided the chief spiritual enlargements of the pleasure principle imaged in the figure of Narcissus.

Narcissus saw the world as a reflection of his own image, as a projection of his own ego. The infant's first awareness is of a state of unity, where the world is sensed as an extension of his body. That aboriginal sense of harmony obtains in its vestigial forms throughout life. But gradually of course, one comes to learn that all things are not one, do not spring from the ego, are not identical; hut that life expresses a series of elements that make themselves felt painfully as limitations of the ego. Limitations of the ego are, as we know, parts of reality which seeks to curb the pleasure which the ego, the imagina­ tion in its vestigial form, seeks to acquire. We come to have a very concrete sense of physical limitation by observing the limits of our bodies, bounded by "something other." The ideal and normal goal is to recognize, not to resist, reality as it exists as a thing apart from the ego and to establish some realistic grounds upon which to meet it so that the "something other" is seen not as a projection of the ego, but as having its own inviolable identity. Since that "something other" is increasingly expansive, that being which unites one man to "something other" is often addressed by Stevens as God, and the correspondences which exist between all things in the immense universe becomes for him the divine scheme of the universe.

A man who addresses himself to the subject of God, reality, and be­ lief, even when he keeps repeating that poetry has nothing whatsoever to do with faith and beliefs, implicitly asks to be considered at times as a religious thinker, at times as a metaphysical thinker. The difference between the two is, I think, important to notice. Both,it seems, are seeking to arrive at a theory of being. With the religious thinker, theory embraces both the human and the metaphysical. With the metaphy­ sical thinker, theory may embrace both the human and the metaphysical or it may be restricted to solely the metaphysical, to fifst causes, to a theory of pure being. To conceive of a theory of being, in this case God’s being, humanistically, attempting to establish a correspondence

between human values and divine processes, is to think from a reli­

gious perspective. This point of view— the religious— is strenuous­

ly maintained in Stevens' essays as well as in many of his poems, es­ pecially in the long poem "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction." And yet, as we will see in dealing with his theory of art and in reading "Ex­ amination of a Hero in Time of Waar," "Extracts from Addresses to the

Academy of Fine Ideas," "Esthetique du Mai," and finally "An Ordin­ ary Evening in New Haven," that Stevens finds it impossible to conceive of God anthropocentrically, and instead, veers toward a theory of being which requires him to believe that everything human and temporal is false, imperfect, crude.

There is, then, a central contradiction of desires manifest at the core of his work: the desire to conceive of the absolute humanistically so that sensuous forms and human beings may seem worthy of being cele­ brated in art; the contrary desire to conceive of the absolute in non­ human terms, and to annihilate sensuous forms and human beings as valid means of understanding. The second desire, of course, is impossible to fulfill. But its impossibility does not prevent him from desiring to achieve it. In any case, whenever he deals with the subject of God in his essays, he attempts for the most part to conceive of him humanisti­ cally. Even though, therefore, he has no use for the church's defini­ tions of God and being, he still grants those definitions a certain va­ lidity, justifying them for the confidence in the world that they in­ spired. One feels that were Stevens himself to have belonged to another century, lie might well have accepted those forms. For although he is

an atheist in the Christian sense of that term, he himself seems not

to take the major responsibility for his atheism. For his, as he writes

repeatedly, is an age of disbelief. All the gods have been denied. But

even without the forms of God, for Stevens the idea of God still obtains.

And it is that idea which he attempts to give form to, to give a fiction to whenever he speculates on conceiving a God in the ideal image of man, and not as a non-human being. The supreme fiction, then, may well be a fond illusion, since it mirrors man’s ideal nature and satisfies his needs. But in his essays Stevens is ready to argue for that illusion in a way that he is not prepared always to do in his later poems— on the grounds that it grants man the things he needs most of all: security and peace.

Therefore, even if the elaborate rigmarole of doctors and lawyers were deceptive and illusive, as Pascal maintained that it was, the ends, for Stevens, have justified the means. The rigmarole, however, was not altogether deceptive; some moral substance and some truth do exist be­ hind the "square hats and robes four times too large.1' The dignity ac­ corded the law was indeed justified in Pascal’s time, as is that accorded the medical profession in ours, for with its formidable achievements to­ day, it has earned the right to exhibit the impressive symbols of its role. Forms, them, are not deceptive fictions, at least not always.

They frequently represent something real which has moral value.

But reality and value themselves are subject to change— in as much as God is immanent in history and process— which must be recorded by changing fictions. As for the highest reality, God Himself, Stevens

maintains that He exists, hut not in the person of the Christian God.

No one destroyed the gods, he writes. They simply dissolved one day

in thin air. But as nobility exists apart from its manifestations,

11 the idea of God" exists apart from any of its forms. It is man's

instinct to renew that idea with fresh inventions, new theories of the

real nature of God. Stevens attempts to provide those definitions and

thereby fulfill his spiritual role as "priest of the invisible."

The "idea of God" achieves definition for Stevens very gradually.

It is conceived, first, anthropocentrically as the angelic imagination

of the poet who makes God in the image of man. It is also conceived less egocentrically as a mystical vis or noeud vital. The poet's en­ thusiastic confidence in his own power to define God is checked by his awareness of the existence of God as a noeud vital which resists any facile humanistic definition. In "The Figure of the Youth as Virile

Poet" and "Imagination as Value," Stevens is awed by the magnitude of the vis or noeud vital. Nevertheless, in those essays it is the imag­ ination of the poet which is celebrated as a powerful and valuable force. But no matter how vigorously Stevens praises the imagination of man, he insists again and again that it is not the only real thing there is— a position that would imply megalomania— but rather that it is only a part of the most powerful being in the universe. God, then^ is seen as both transcendent and immanent in reality. Even in his anthro- pocentric view of being, Stevens saw the noeud vital in its pure form as superior to man. He never went so far in his essays as to say, with the Platonist, that pure being is degraded by its incarnation in a human

form. But that is clearly what he has expressed in "Examination of a

Hero in Time of War" and any number of smaller poems in "Parts of a

World" and in'Transport to Summer." In the long poem "An Ordinary Even­

ing in New Haven," he strives desperately to purify only as much of the

human experience as he thinks can be abstracted into heaven. But he

sadly concludes that while there are sensuous particulars worthy of be­

ing transported to paradise, he can find no way of abstracting them

without doing them violence, and at the same time, he knows that with­

out abstracting them, they are doomed to decay and therefore destined to

be degraded so that they are no longer sufficiently noble to be worthy

of heaven.

It is, I suggest, the inevitable degradation that hnmtt” forms and

sensuous reality suffer that forces Stevens to turn to philosophy and

science to discover poetic concepts which he claims reside at the foun­

ts inhead of all systems of thought. In "A Collect of Philosophy," those

concepts do not place the poetic imagination, man, at the center of the

universe. They refer instead to the austere and anonymous plan of the

universe of which the imagination is only a part and to the supreme force

at the center of it. In the late essay "On Poetic Truth," Stevens sees

' as inherently poetic concepts not those which dignify man, placing him

at the center of the universe, but rather those which impose upon man a

sense of his own limitation. Reason, in these final essays, curbs the

imagination which seeks to exalt in its own power, by making it aware of

infinity and the vis or noeud vital which dwarf it to pigmy size. The ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply grateful to my adviser, Professor Roy Harvey Pearce for his guidance in this study and in all of my graduate work at Ohio

State. I am also indebted to Professors Albert Kuhn and Lloyd Parks for their sensitive advice.

iii equilibrium of the imagination and reality is expressed at this point in strongly religious terms, not because God has been conceived in the image of man, but because man is humbled before a power too immense to be easi­ ly understood.

In the face of its own miniscule power sensed as a contrast to infi­ nity, the imagination does not cower and retreat. Rather, man attempts that almost impossible, most ambitious understanding of God.

There is one most welcome and authentic note; it is the insistence on a reality that forces itself upon our conscious­ ness and refuses to be managed and mastered. It is here that the affinity of art and religion is most evident to­ day. Both have to mediate for us a reality not ourselves. This is what the poet does. The supreme virtue here is hu­ mility, for the humble are they that move about the world with the love of the real in their hearts (O.P., p. 238).

He recognizes with a pupreme sense of humility and reality (in sensing his own limitations), that he must "mediate...a reality not ourselves,” a reality which he associates with the contemporary scientific vision of Planck, even while he maintains that Pascal's vision of God was much greater, because more human, than Planck's. Since it is Planck's vision of reality which is contemporary, it is his reality we must confront.

Stevens believed that we cannot afford to accept the fact that God is non-human, for we implicitly acknowledge that man is quite paltry and that no experience on earth has any enduring meaning after death.

Therefore, once he understands the idea of God implied in the poetic concepts in philosophy and science, Stevens begins to determine how he must transform those concepts so that the vision implied by them can be made understandable and relevant to human beings.

The most sublime wish— to define God humanistically— is fulfilled k6

in the supreme fiction. Once the gods had dissolved, man with sudden \ "bravery and strength, mindful that he was bereft of his parent-gods and that now everything depended upon him, suddenly accepted the respon­ sibility which for centuries he had placed upon the gods. He received this authority not with magisterial pomp, but with a pure humility and natural grace, as though he had not even asked for it.

At the same time, no man ever muttered a petition in his heart for the restoration of those unreal shapes. There was always in every man the increasingly human self~ which instead of remaining the observer, the non-parti­ cipant, the deliquent, became constantly more and more all there was or so it seemed; and whether it was so or merely seemed so still left it for him to resolve life and the world in his own terms (O.P., p. 207).

What shapes, what fictions, does the new reality take for Stevens?

As far as the essays themselves are concerned, the Manichean world view is annulled as heresy. Evil is to be blotted out. Since "Life is the elimination of what is dead," (O.P., p. 169), the poet rescues himself, like the saint and the mystic, from "the world's poverty and change and evil and death" (O.P., p. 167). This requires an enormous act of will.

Reason also is needed to "methodize," to implement the ideal in order to achieve an equilibrium between the imagination and reality, so that the vision of the imagination can be believable.

The most serene integration that the poet can achieve in the sphere of human affairs is to relate God to man so that He is friendly and vital, instead of inexplicable and austere. When Stevens speaks of hu­ manizing and poeticising Planck's view of the world, one feels that he has at last defined his central problem. The reason, of course, is that he must discover what connection Planck's view has to what Caroce describes 47 as the "normal aspect" of "everyday life today." Together with Croce,

Stevens asks in "The Noble Rider...,"

...what is the material which takes on the form of sound and imagery? It is the whole man: the man who thinks and wills, and loves, and hates; who is strong and weak, su­ blime and pathetic, good and wicked; man in the exultation and agony of living; and together with the man, integral with him (N.A., p. l6 ).

As Roy Harvey Pearce has correctly observed, purity in Stevens' art leads to a progressive de-humanization. But one feels that Stevens himself is aware of this fact and that he often tries as much as he can to control that negative tendency in his art by attempting to in­ corporate human experience into a view of being that he comes to con­ ceive of as non-human. He knew also that the imagination's instinct for nobility could not easily be harnessed, that it was driven to per­ fect itself by achieving visions of being so noble that they had no connection whatsoever with sensuous reality and humanity. The desire for perfection and the fear of perfection: these contrary desires and tendencies in Stevens' thought and art, reflected in his divergent views of God (as non-human, or as human), stand at the core of his thought. Had he desired only self-perfection, then perhaps he might have detached himself from humanity and from the sensuous world ruth­ lessly and arrogantly. Instead, he is torn by contrary desires— to live richly in this world and to anticipate his non-human existence after death. One feels, therefore, that he somewhat ruefully decided to conceive of God in non-human terms and to perfect himself into that non-human being, as though he chose to follow one path not because he violently renounced the other, but in spite of the fact that the other U8

still held its Inescapable charm for him. And so— since the rejections

are never fierce— the things he alvays loved (the sense of youth, beauty

and humanity) appear again and again in the later poems, reminding us of

that humanizing sympathy Stevens expressed in the poems in Harmonium for

those things we all love and can experience only on earth.

Perhaps the most touching and warm expressions of love for the human,

a passage which we will think of whenever we recall Stevens' achievement

with warm sympathy and the highest praise, comes at the end of his essay

"Imagination as Value." He quotes Jean Paulhan, who wrote in Les Fleurs

de Tarbes,

"One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign: It is forbidden To enter into the garden Carrying flowers.

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of litera­ ture. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of red poppies" (N.A., p. 155).

Stevens comments on this passage:

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love and beauty, is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give (N.A., p. 155)*

Stevens' poetry was meant to show normal human beings casually straying in the world of art. In its more austere sense, it was in­ tended to show the poet attempting in his poems to express his under- standing of God. The second preoccupation for all of us is necessary.

For the poem, like a cathedral, must he built before the reader can pass through its portals.

The imagination which for Stevens expresses the instinct for no­ bility strives to discover those aspects of reality which are pure and noble. In its enthusiasm to fulfill itself, the imagination often claims to discover something that is clearly unreal, and thereupon, reason either forces the imagination to surrender its beliefs or helps it to refine its wishes. As I observed, for Stevens belief is possible under the following conditions: forms must be sufficiently noble to warrant belief in the first place; they must be fudged real by the senses; finally, they must be neither intimidating nor banal, but ra­ ther fuse the commonplace with the aristocratic. Instead of emphasi­ zing the frequent stages of open warfare between reason and the imagi­ nation, for the most part in his essays Stevens serenely conceives of them as ajndably participating in a joint activity of giving validity to the wishes of the imagination.

Man's highest spiritual quest is to define the pattern of the uni­ verse and the being at its center. Without relying upon the church for definitions, Stevens attempts to confront the idea of God without any preconceived notions. For him, it is both an immensely grandiose idea and a terrifying one which seems without definitions to constitute a bleak, terrifying nothingness. Turning to physicists and philosophers for aid in defining God, Stevens realizes that his problem is to humanize their definitions of the highest reality— timeless, basic, powerful— to charge them with human values. When, therefore, God is defined hu­ manistically, the highest reality for Stevens is described as the su­ preme fiction. His view of the highest reality, as it is expressed in his essays, is ultimately anthropocentric.

His poetry, however, (where he does not sustain the serene composure that the vaguely benevolent vision of God as a supreme fiction evokes from him) is fraught with frustration and the torment of uncertainty.

In his final poems he wants to know the highest reality, not as a su­ preme fiction— not as a reflection of man— but as "something other" with its own inviolable, non-human being. The non-human, indeed, comes to constitute, then, the highest, reality expressed in his final poems.

Ironically, therefore, with that bleak vision, the imagination is granted its purest wish.

In the following chapter, where I deal with his theory of poetry, I show how Stevens attempts to achieve a definition of God, highest reality, by discovering precisely where He is located. Initially God is seen as existing above the earth and, as it were, like a "venerable beam of light," shining upon the surfaces of the sensuous world, casting them over with a holy light. Gradually for Stevens God comes to exist with­ in nature, beneath surfaces, so that in order to arrive at Him, one must destroy the surfaces of nature. In the first vision, God is conceived benevolently, because to partake of him enhances life, transforming earth into a paradise. But in the final view, the price of ultimate knowledge and pure being is death. CHAPTER II

DIALECTIC AMD TRANSFIGURATION: A THEORY OF POETRY

For Stevens, poetry is, quite literally, to stand at the very cen­ ter of man's spiritual life. It is to replace the church and all offi­ cialdom within it and yet, at the same time, lead the way to God. How­ ever, since he believes that the mind must devise definitions rather than accept ready-made meanings, Stevens has to discover for himself what course he will take in order to find God. ''Religion” becomes a problem for him only after he has made the decision that his subject will be the quest for perfection. By what means is that decision made in the first place? Is the search for the absolute an instinctive activity of the imagination? Or rather, is some faculty besides the imagination involved in making the decision?

In speaking about the imagination in "The Noble Rider...," Stevens suggests that the imagination is not invariably impelled toward God, but rather that it can be degraded far below what he calls the "level of reality" ("the level of appearances," the "level of resemblances"). If this happens, the imagination may well create a cheap music hall or ta­ vern, and not a cathedral:

In metaphor, there is no...level. If there were it would be the level of resemblance of the imagination, which has no such level. If, to our surprise, we should meet a monsieur who told us he was from another world, and if he had in fact all the indicia of divinity, the luminous body, the nimbus, the heraldic stigmata, we should recognize him as above the level of nature but not as above the level of the imagination. So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio— remarks

51 52 made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales— we should recog­ nize him as below the level of nature but not below the level of the imagination (N.A., pp. 73-7^)•

This passage from "The Noble Rider...," would seem to indicate, there­ fore, that the freedom the imagination can exercise is boundless. It

is, however, restricted once the decision to seek spiritual commitment is made. By what authority is that decision made? Stevens never ans­ wers the question directly, perhaps because he never raised it in the first place. Nevertheless, in "The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” as though he had overlooked that he had earlier written that the imagina­ tion has no level and can descend below as well as above the level of nature, he writes that "The poet reflecting on his course...will decide to do as the imagination bids because he has no choice" (N.A., p. 65).

By the time Stevens comes to write "The Figure of the Youth...," the poet's concept of the imagination has obliged him to soar "above" the level of nature.

The poems in "Harmonium" project the image of the mind before and after that crucial decision is made. In certain poems, therefore, the imagination descends into the ugly, farcical, banal, and the price of the descent is distortion, malice, cruelty. But whenever the imagination confronts ugliness, tedium and death in any of the poems written after

"Harmonium," it is not altogether degraded by descending below the level of reality; for now there is a noble, a spiritual purpose which trans­ forms and sanctions its enterprises: Stevens wishes to curb wish-ful- fillment by an austere, at times a monstrous, view of reality. The ma­ jor decision, then, one that chooses from among the multivarious poetic 53

concepts those that indicate the course of his aspirations, rejects all

hut noble enterprises. If the imagination is not curbed in this way, it will squander its powers on false, ignoble enterprises, degrade itself

and ultimately conjure a vision that is restrictive because hateful and destructive.

In"The Necessary Angel," then, the imagination is identified with freedom (expansiveness), love, purity, mysticism and God. The effect of poetry, of writing poetry, is described as ecstasy. The tendency in ele­ vating the imagination and poetry is to proceed from the sensuous world, from the temporal and the mundane, to things completely non-sensuous, eternal, abstract. In "Ideas of Order" the body is shed like the skin

of a snake, to make way for a clean new form. In "A Collect of Philo­ sophy," Stevens criticizes the "eternal philosopher," whose view of being, he writes, "is difficult to take seriously" when he must rely

"on the evidence of the teeth, the throat and the bowels" (O.P., p. 193).

In "Auroras of Autumn," where the image of his mind is most pure and ascetic, the poet is seen once again divesting himself of the body; but this time, he refuses to take on another form. And finally, at the end of his career, he notes that "...it is impossible to say that there can be no faults, since it is precisely the faults of life that this poem enables us to leave behind" (O.P., p. 193).

These preceding remarks indicate only that for Stevens the imagina­ tion and its vision of being become increasingly purified throughout his career. They do not, however, disclose precisely what means Stevens used to achieve that purification. While only a careful examination of his poetry can disclose his aesthetics in its greatest detail— since, of

course, in his poetry Stevens expressed a much wider range of experience

and emotions than he does in his essays-- a study of the essays prepares

one to recognize his major techniques as he devises them in his poetry.

The quest for God (pure "being), as I have observed, is the central

theme of Stevens' poetry. That theme, as he wrote again and again, has

some affinity to the Platonist's tendency to "draw ourselves away...from

the facts of the world about us and establish some communion with ob­

jects which are apprehendedby thought and not sense" (N.A., p. 9 5 ). The withdrawal from the world is, as he wrote in "The Noble Rider...," ac­

complished by the process of abstraction:

...his own measure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of all the lovers of the truth, is the measure of his power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his ab­ straction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist. He must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination (N.A., p. 23).

As the general term which signifies purification, abstraction has a num­ ber of related meanings for Stevens. In "The Noble Rider..." it is con­

ceived of simply as an activity, as the process of extracting a concrete particular from "the pressures of reality" which threaten to destroy it and of elevating that particular into the immaculate atmosphere of the poem (which, for Stevens, is the emblem of paradise.) In this earlier view of abstraction, the concrete particular is neither mutilated in any way, nor destroyed; rather the human and the sensuous world are en­ hanced, idealized. For since the poem is conceived as a metaphor for heaven, abstracting the particular into the poem perforce elevates sen- CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: GRAVITY AND GRACE: THE UNENDING MEDITATION .... 1

ONE: REALITY AS THE SUPREME FICTION...... 9

TWO: DIALECTIC AND TRANSFIGURATION: A THEORY OF POETRY...... 51

THREE: HAEMONIUM AND CACAPHONY: THE SOUNDS OF NOBILITY...... 83

FOUR: CRISIS, DELUSION, DISINTEGRATION...... 152

FIVE: THE PERFECTED SPIRIT AND THE GENIUS OF EVIL...... 207

SIX: "IN THE STALE GRANDEUR OF ANNIHILATION"...... 268

CONCLUSION: GOD AS EPISTEMOLOGIST AND DREAMER...... 290

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 300

AUTOBIOGRAPHY...... 301

iv 55

suous reality so that heaven, its boundaries extended, is seen to encom­

pass the earth in a bounteous embrace.

This is Stevens' earliest view of abstraction. It is, as I shall

observe, sustained in some form throughout his poetry, although it is

qualified by other views. A second view is expressed as the "ascent to

God," first articulated in "Three Academic Pieces” (1947). But it is a

concept that stands at virtually the beginning and the end of his career.

It is expressed in two senses: first, as the feeling of elevation and

ecstasy in "The Hoble Rider...” and particularly in "The Figure of the

Youth... ir Second, "ascent" is implied by a planned, orderly, step-by-

step progression toward the absolute. As Stevens writes in "The Figure of the Youth...,” "Poetry is metamorphosis" (p. 45). That metamorphosis may be achieved suddenly: as a noble concrete particular transported miraculously into the sky, or as birds suddenly flying upward, or as arpeggios mount evoking the sense of thrilling and exciting motion. When metamorphosis is protracted and serene, however, the steps from one level of reality (sensuous) to another (less sensuous) may be plotted in some detail.

There is yet another view of abstraction, one which comes to dominate

Stevens' thought in "Parts of a World," "Transport to Summer" and "The

Rock.” This view requires that sensuous reality Be altogether destroyed, abandoned as the only means of finally achieving the absolute. In this third sense of abstraction, Stevens refers not only to the activity of abstracting (extracting)— not only to process^then, but to the state of being which one must finally achieve after the process has been completed: the state of being that is disembodied, dehumanized-- in a word, abstract.

It is this final view of abstraction (as both process and product) that

expresses Stevens' attempt to conceive of God, the highest reality, in

terms of its non-human being. To summarize, therefore, when abstraction

is conceived of only as process, humanity is transported to heaven.

When abstraction is conceived of as both process and product, however,

then man can be admitted into paradise only after he has been thoroughly

dehumanized— after, that is, he has surrendered his mind as well as his

body.

As I observed in the preceding chapter, the realization that in

order to know the absolute he would have to divest himself of his hu­

manity caused Stevens great anquish. To the very end of his career, he was unable to accommodate himself to the price he would have to pay in

order to know God as a being in itself, and not as a reflection of man.

This is why his vision is both sublime and tragic. It would be incor­

rect, therefore, to conclude that at one point of his career, Stevens

decided to experience abstraction as process and product, having cate­

gorically given up all desire to conceive of the absolute humanistically.

Indeed, although he had experimented with abstraction as both process and product in "Parts of a World" and "Transport to Summer," as well as

in the poems in "The Rock," he conceives of God humanistically in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," where abstraction is seen solely as process whose final product is a ceaselessly changing, idealized human form and mind. Finally, in "The Rock," the poet ascends the stairs to heaven.

But whether he becomes progressively disembodied with every step up or 57

whether he still retains his human form as he approaches the absolute

is ambiguous throughout. That ambiguity, I suggest, is the nearest

Stevens can come to resolving the human and the non-human vision of the

absolute. In his most austerely realistic moments he feels that he must

view ultimate being non-humanistically. And yet he is horrified by the

realization that pure being expresses nothing familiar and human. His

love of the sensuously experienced leads him to say, in"Three Academic

Pieces:11

What a ghastly situation it would be if the world of the dead was actually different from the world of the living, and, if as life ends, instead of passing to a former Vic­ torian sphere, we passed into a land in which none of our problems had been solved, after all, ,and nothing resembled anything we have ever known and nothing resembled anything else in shape, in color, in sound, in look or otherwise. To say farewell to our generation and to look forward to a continuation in a Jerusalem of pure surrealism would account for the taste for oblivion (N.A., pp. 76-77)*

A view of reality, shockingly novel— one which ruptures the continuity of human existence, he claims, shakes our confidence in the world. He wants to believe that the beautiful and the good he experiences today will endure forever. His essays, for the most part, express the desire to believe in a serene, non-vidlent transformation of earth into paradise which idealizes rather than destroys man. In his poetry, however, he copes directly with evil, violence, and death, and with a non-human God.

But in his essays Stevens maintains that the special gift of the poet is abstraction solely as process:

.••his own measure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of all the lovers of the truth, is the measure of his power to abstract himself, and to withdraw with him into his ab­ straction the reality on which the lovers of truth insist. He must be able to abstract himself, and also to abstract reality, ■which he does by placing it in his imagination (N.A., p. 23).

The recurrence of an early technique which partly contradicts the later

view of abstraction as being as well as process, suggests in advance

that Stevens' poetry cannot be read rigidly and that we cannot condemn

him for contradicting himself, for maintaining to the very end of his

life two divergent views of being: one conceived humanistically, the

other non-humanistically. He seems convinced in "Parts of a World"

that the body has to be annulled in the final view of being. But his

desire to affirm life, to affirm the human form, is too great to be de­

nied categorically. The fusion of contrary desires, therefore, perforce

qualifies the final product from time to time, making it neither alto­

gether sensuous, nor altogether abstract.

The following pages discuss Stevens' aesthetic in its two phases:

(l) centering on his view of man idealized and God conceived in terms

of that idealized image; this vigv of being is expressed in an aesthetic

which sees abstraction solely as process. (2 ) centering on his view of

non-human reality, of which man himself, when he dies, is destined to

become a part; this view of being is expressed in an aesthetic which

sees abstraction as product as well as process.

This second phase of Stevens' aesthetic (where abstraction is an

end as well as a means) is discussed in much less detail in the essays

than in the poems themselves. For in his prose, as I nave already ob­

served, Stevens' vision of being is consistently serene and benevolent.

I bring into relief, however, those few passages in his essays where

Stevens writes of abstraction as product, as well as process. There he 59 conjures a stark and violent vision of being, where appearances are destroyed to disclose the inner reality. Finally, it is only with this second phase of Stevens' aesthetic, this "ultimate” aesthetic, in mind that one can understand Stevens' last poems, as well as the frightening goal toward which abstraction as process inexorably leads.

"The Imperfect is our paradise”

There is a structure within nature which enaoles the poet to arrive at a theory of art: "...if we desire to formulate an accurate theory of poetry, we find it necessary to examine the structure of reality, be­ cause reality is the central reference for poetry" (N.A., p. 71)* On this point, Stevens adds, "One of the significant components of the structure of reality is the resemblance between things." Resemblance means a similarity between two or more things. It does not mean iden­ tity: "We are not dealing with identity. Both in nature and in meta­ phor identity is the vanishing point of resemblance. After all, if a roan'b exact double entered the room, seated himself and spoke the words that were in the man's mind, it would remain a resemblance" (N.A., p. 72).

And again: "Nature is not mechanical... Its prodigy is not identity but resemblance and its universe of reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation." Nor does resemblance mean imitation.

The difference between imitation and resemblance is a nicety. An imitation may be described as an identity manque. It is artificial. It Is not fortuitous as a true metaphor is. If it is an imitation of something in nature...it may even surpass identity and assume a praeter- nature...If it is an imitation of something in metaphor, it is lifeless and that, finally, is what is wrong with it (N.A., p. 73). Resemblance implies repetition and continuity. "It binds together. It

is the base of appearance." But imitation, which, strictly speaking, does

not even 6xist, denies change and evolution. An ideal aesthetic, Stevens believed, must, above all, reject stasis, discontinuity, and confinement:

"..*.one of the consequences of the ordination of style is not to limit

it, but to enlarge it, not to impoverish it, but to enrich and liberate

it" (O.P., p. 205).

Identities are almost as sterile as single facts understood apart from anything else. As Stevens writes in the essay "About One of Mari­ anne Moorefs Poems:" "To confront fact in its total Weakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience" (N.A., p. 9 5 ). What can possibly issue from such an experience? Perhaps, as Stevens suggests in "The

Snow Man," the value of nothingness and desolation. He writes in "On

Poetic Truth," that there is value in those experiences; for they drive one back into experience and life, toward "something other:"

And the wonder and mystery of art, as indeed of religion in the last resort, is the revelation of something 'wholly other' by which the inexpressible loneliness of thinking is broken and enriched. To know facts as facts in the or­ dinary way has, indeed, no particular power or worth. But a quickening of our awareness of the irrevocability by which a thing is what it is, has such power, and it is, I believe, the very soul of art. But no fact is a bare fact, no individual is a universe in itself (O.P., p. 237).

The following passage suggests the joy Stevens feels when he turns away from a scene that is grey, vacant, inoperative and depressing to one that is life-giving and vivid:

In the graveyard were possibly eight or ten sheep...There were a few cedars here and there but these only accentuated the sense of abandonment and destitution, the sense that, 6l

after all, the vast mausoleum of human memory is emptier than one had supposed. Near by stood the manse, also of limestone, apparently vacant, the upper part of each win­ dow white with the half-drawn blind, the lower part black with the vacantness of the place. Although the two elderly men were in a way a diversion from the solitude, there could not be any effective diversion from the reality that time and experience had created here, the desolation that penetrated one like something final. Later,...I went to the exhibition of books in the Morgan Library held by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. The brilliant pages from Poland, France, Finland and so on, books of tales, of poetry, of folklore, were as if the barren reality that I had just experienced had suddenly taken color, become alive and from a single thing become many things and people, vivid, active, intently trying out a thousand characters and illu­ minations (N.A., pp. 101-102).

The proliferation of objects within the scene stirs the imagination to sudden life. Not content to perceive one isolated object, the mind reaches out hungrily from one to another. The similarity of things in nature enables the mind to advance by leaps and bounds. Establishing resemblances, therefore, is not initially a discipline to be mastered with much effort. Instead, the mind romps gayly, as it were, in its natural habitat, making perception a joyful exercise.

A single object often calls to mind another object that is not present. Resemblances, then, occur between two or more sensuous ob­ jects, or between one sensuous object and one that exists only as mem­ ory. Or, one object— or the recollection of an object— often gives rise to speculations about a certain idea; the relationship is de­ scribed as existing between one real object and one unreal object, and the object is said to resemble the idea. Thus, "one may find intimations of immortality in an object on the mantlepiecej and these intimations are as real in the mind in which they occur as the mantle-piece itself"

(N.A., p. 75) • On the highest level of abstraction, two concepts may 62

resemble each other, as, for example, the idea of God automatically sug­

gests the idea of goodness.

Stevens does not undertake a detailed description of the relationship

between any of the objects he cites. Whenever he speaks of relating two

or more things, he says quite casually that they "resemble" each other.

He does not care to explain in what respect they are similar; nor does

he feel that he must justify relating them. The activity of discovering

resemblances needs no justification for him; it is an aspect of the

pleasure principle that asserts itself as an instinct. The more resem­

blances one can discover, the keener is the pleasure. He invests the

imagination with a certain element of playfulness; and, as he writes,

the range of resemblances is indeed "an adult make-believe" (N.A., p. 75) •

Since the maximum degree of pleasure is derived by contemplating

two flawlessly pure objects (i.e., abstractions, concepts), the poet

withdraws from the sensuous world until he attains the highest abstrac­

tion, which is, for Stevens, the highest reality. In the ascent to God,

concrete objects are needed as kinds of stepping-stones from one level

of perfection to another. The stepping-stone, therefore, implies a

step-by-step procedure, as does the phrase Stevens uses to convey this

idea, "gradus ad metaphoram." Yet any deliberate plan to reach God

seems to contradict his belief that the imagination probes fortuitous­

ly and freely into the unreal and yields an "unofficial" view of being.

(Poetry, in this respect, contrasts with the aua&ere performance of the

philosopher, whose determined probing issues in an "official" view of being.)

There exists, then, a further paradox at the core of his aesthetic: that the probing o$5k poet into the unknown is to be both determined

and fortuitous. SteveW' is firmly resolved to avoid systematically de­

fining any term; his inte^'io*1 is to express only the "nature" of the

term. His theory of art furtn^more endorses ambiguity (a synthesis of

clarity and obscurity) within the^oem. In fact, it does more than

this. It provides the techniques by\tfM.ch the poet may achieve am­ biguity. To understand them, then, I brW:k down the term "ambiguity"

into its two component parts, clarity and obscurity, discussing each

one, independently of the other.

The Axes of the prism. Spiritual growth is measured by the degree to which one withdraws from the sensuous world by transcending the "base of nature," the comparison of two sensuous objects. Without knowing in advance precisely what he is seeking, the artist proceeds upward through levels of reality that are increasingly pure; those levels are expressed at times as parallel planes lodged at different distances from the sen­

suous world. By observing the similarities among them, the poet attempts

to elevate the ooject that is the least pure to the level of the purest.

At the same time, the analogy records the distances between them, like a

footbridge which connects one moderately high mountain to another whose

snow-topped peak seems to dissolve among the clouds.

In the beginning, of course, the poet does not aspire so high. The

instinct for establishing resemblances is aroused by his encounter with the world. Desire bursts from within, driving him to that "something other" that will fulfill him. He carries on an unflagging love affair 64

with the universe. The ego emerges from Itself as exfoliation, sprig,

tangent, second self, apposite, double. All of these words are implied

by a word Stevens uses again and again, "extension."

Extension, the projection of the ego upon the universe, is the ex­

pansion of resemblances beyond the "level of nature." Pleasure is sus­

tained and intensified through the "proliferation of resemblances." Ex­

tension can be achieved by bringing into relief one characteristic ob­

served in a series of objects arranged ;limactically to evoke the plea­

sure of a gradual crescendo.

The sand is yellow between the green and the blue. In • short, the light alone creates a unity not only in the receding® of distance, where differences become invisi­ ble, but also in the contacts of closer sight. So, too, sufficiently generalized, each man resembles all other men, each woman resembles all other women, this year re­ sembles last year. The beginning of time will, no doubt, resemble the end of time. One World is said to resemble another (N.A», pp. 71-72).

At times, the large degree of similarity between objects makes under­ standing possible, especially when the objects arranged are in the order of their magnitude. There are moments, however, when the imagination proceeds by leaps and bounds, briskly joining objects in jerky movements.

If we raise a building to an imaginative height, then the building becomes an imaginative building since height in itself is imaginative. It is the moderator of life as metempsychosis was of death. Nietzsche walked in the Alps in the caresses of reality. We ourselves crawl out of our offices and classrooms and become alert at the opera. Or we sit listening to music as in an imagination in which we believe. If the imagination is the faculty by which we im­ port the unreal into what is ipeal, its value is the value of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man. It creates images that are independent of their originals since nothing is more certain than that the imagination is agreeable to the imagination. When one's INTRODUCTION

GRAVITY AND GRACE: THE UNENDING MEDITATION

"Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthetlque du Mai," and finally

"Ike Rock" have generally been taken by his readers as expressing the

most significant statements on belief that Wallace Stevens has made. In

this study I proceed on the assumption that these works represent the

formulation of a credo that emerged only after Stevens had tested and

modified certain fundamental commitments he held from the beginning of

his career. My intention, therefore, is to define those changing com­

mitments and to account for their manifestations la his poetry.

Ike central question that Stevens confronts again and again is how

man in our time, bereft of gods and spiritual truths which could formerly

sustain belief, is to express his instinct for nobility. An image of

nobility, Stevens maintained, must be believable; it must, furthermore,

be purified of the grossly imperfect. For Stevens the purest poetic

concept is the idea of God. His most ambitious goal, then, is to define

that poetic concept and to provide forms worthy of being manifestations

of God.

Ike quest for God Is only vaguely implied in the poems in "Harmonium," but comes thereafter gradually to take on notable shape and direction.

In "Ideas of Order" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar," Stevens expresses a desperate need for "some imperishable bliss," hoping that art Itself can provide it. Denying categorically in "Farts of a World" that art

itself can suffice as a thing worthy of belief, he nontheless declares in that group of poems his intention to define his beliefs. In "Transport 65

aunt in California writes that the geraniums are up to her second-story window, we soon have them running over the roof. All this diversity, which I have intention­ ally piled up in confusion in the paragraph, is typical of the imagination (N.A., pp. 150-151).

In its most natural and spontaneous state, "unsponsored, free," the

imagination is not scrupulous about ordering; if it were, then it would

first "crawl out of our offices and classrooms," then observe the "ger­

aniums... up to her second-story window,...piling over the roof," then

perhaps "become alert at the opera," then— who knows?— raise "a build­

ing to an imaginative height," then walk with "Nietzsche...in the Alps

in the caresses of reality," and finally, pose as "the moderator of life,

as metempsychosis was of death." Furthermore, it is apparently not in the

slightest degree embarrassed at magnifying, heightening, increasing, ex­

tending. To grow is a normal activity; it is nothing to be ashamed of.

And so, extending turns out to be a slightly irresponsible and

Jaunty exercise, as when one carries on a mock debate on the basis of

the slimest evidence. In the second and third of the "Three Academic

Pieces," "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together," the poet "contemplates/

A wholly artificial nature, in which/ The profusion of metaphor has been

increased" (N.A., p. 8 3 ). Studying the pineapple, he defines it— de­ lighted with his own ingeniousness— with the epicure's sense of enco­ mium:

The root of a form... a fund, The angel at the center of this rind,

This husk of Cuba, tufted emerald, Himself..., the irreducible X

• • •

Its inhabitant and elect expositor. 66

This "X", of course, is a "tangent of himself," "as image is a second of the self." For him, a single object, the pineapple, is rich enough for contemplation. But the "scholar, captious, told him that.../.. .the truth was not the respect of one,/ But always of many things." There are, in fact, two objects of contemplation, even though there seems to be only one, for he is speaking of doth himself and the pineapple.

The scholar apparently exclaims how incredible, preposterous are the poet's subjects. The poet himself does not have to be reminded of this fact. He knows perfectly well what he is doing, but he adds in a twinkling: "the incredible, also has its truth" (N.A., p. 85).

In part three of the poem, metaphor has gone wild. Things are joined together for no apparent reason except for the sake of joining them. And yet in stanzas four, five, and six, the numbers before each line imply a rigid order to the activity of extension— an order that simply does not exist. What a mad scurry.' When, finally, will it come to an end? The poet gives the answer? "The small luxuriations.. .por­ tend/ Universal delusions of universal grandeurs" (N.A., p. 87). He will not cease his singing until he reaches the "exultant terminal,"

"...the happiest sense in which/ A world agrees, thought's compromise, resolved/ At last, the center of resemblance...."

The flamboyant disorder in Stevens' poetry and prose suggests the youthful robust unconcern for principle, a spontaneous friendliness, humor and gaiety. The youth bounds from self to God in one imaginative leap. But as he grows older, the steps in between begin to assume greater importance. 67

The Important question is: what is the significance of the poetic act...? I am thinking of it in terras of meaning of value for the poet. ...The poet finds that as between these two sources: the imagination and reality, the imagination is false, what­ ever else may be said of it, and reality is true; and being concerned that poetry should be a thing of vital and virile importance, he commits himself to'reality, which then becomes his inescapable and ever-present difficulty and inamorata. In any event, he has lost nothing; for the imagination, while it might have led him to purities beyond definition, never yet progressed except by particulars. Having gained the world, the imaginative remains available to him in respect to all the particulars of the world. Instead of having lost anything, he has gained a sense of direction and a certainty of under­ standing’.1 He has strengthened himself to resist the bogus. He has become like a man who can see what he wants to see and touch what he wants to touch. In all his poems with all their enchantments for the poet himself, there is the final 6nchant- ^ment that they are all true. The significance of the poetic act then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration. It is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock (£.P., p. 2b0-2kl).

The poet begins to go beyond sporadic and rapturous beginnings and,

in the middle of a journey, he looks hopefully forward to a happy reso­ lution. He begins to observe an evolution in his own thought, that he

is reaching a state in the present he had never before experienced. He begins, then, to evaluate the changes that have gone on inside his mind.

This taking account of oneself is the chief beauty, Stevens writes, of the dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus in Valery*s "Eupalinos:"

"...as the talk begins to reach its end, there emerges from it an Anti-

Socrates, to whom an Anti-Phaedrus is listening, as if their conversation had been, after all, a process of judging and rejudging what they had done in the past, with the object of arriving at a state of mind equi­ valent to illusion" (O.P., p. 27*0. One rises to new heights only by stages. The pinnacle is the base— not of sensuous reality, but of the 68 imagination. Stevens refers to it varyingly as "force," as "Metaphor"— with a capital M— and, borrowing a term from Baudelaire, as "transcen­ dent analogue." In the above passage, it is referred to as a "state of mind equivalent to an illusion." He describes the steps that must he taken in order to arrive at the Metaphor:

There is a gradus ad Metaphoram. The nature of a metaphor is, like the nature of a play, comic, tragic, tragic-comic and so on. It may be poetic. A poetic metaphor— that is to say, a metaphor poetic in a sense more specific than the sense in which poetry and metaphor are one— appears to be poetry a-t its source. It Is. At least it is poetry at one of itB sources although not necessarily the most fecundating. But the steps to this particular abstraction, the gradus ad Met­ aphoram in respect to the general sense in which poetry and metaphor are one, are, like the ascent to any of the ab­ stractions that interest us importantly, an ascent through illusion which gathers round us more closely and thickly, as we might expect it to do, the more we penetrate it (N.A., p. 81).

He speculates about the highest concept in aesthetics, the ultimate poem and the theory of art which subsumes all the arts:

There is a universal poetry that is reflected in every­ thing. This remark approaches the idea of Baudelaire that there exists an unascertained and fundamental aesthetic, or order, of which poetry and painting are manifestations, but of which for that matter, sculpture or music or any other aesthetic realization would equally be a manifesta­ tion. Generalizations as expansive as these:...are specu­ lative (H.A., p. l60).

And, In "A Collect of Philosophy," he writes that poetic concepts exist at the fountainhead of systems of philosophy and metaphysics. The ideas briefly commented upon concern the largest things in the universe and are, therefore, in his opinion, the most expansive: the Idea of infi­ nity, the idea of "the ricorsl of Vico, the idea of the EwigeB Wie- derkehr of Nietzschej the idea of freedom as developed in the French. 69

philosopher Lequier; the idea of 'les verites eternelles1 of Malebranche"

(O.P., p. 19*0; not to exclude the idea of God and the idea of "the

ascent into heaven which is only a little below it."

There is a reason why Stevens isolates these ideas and speaks about

them in the abstract. Instead of relating them to any impure object,

there are times that he wishes to remain at the level of abstraction so

that the pure concept can radiate reseniblances. The concept, then, does

not become a stepping-stone to a higher reality; it needs no purifying,

since it is already abstract. It exists as a world in itself, in a

constellation of heavenly bodies, on the level where "everything is

poetic:" "There are levels of thought or vision where everything Is

poetic. But there are levels of philosophy and for that matter of poetry where nothing is poetic. Our object is to stay on the levels where

everything is poetic" (O.P., p. 1 9 0 ). The dream of reaching the "vis"

or Ixoeud vital," the center of the universe, motivates the ceaseless

quest of the poet. At times, the source is defined simply, perhaps too

simply, as the poet's "subject," his "sense of the world" (N.A., p. 120).

Yet, for him, most writers never discover what their subject is, but passively inherit someone else's. Only one's own subject can liberate vast reserves of energy within one. Again and again he writes of the

"suddenness inherent in poetic metamorphosis." (O.P., p. 227). When he uses the words reinforce, sublimate, extend, transfigure, expand, or the phrases intensification of the sense of reality, the poem within the poem, and the reality within the reality— all of which suggest that he is penetrating beyond illusion to arrive at the "center," the 70 elan vital, he implies that art can effect enormous changes in the poet and in his readers.

In "The Figure of the Youth...," Stevens speculates upon the uses of such power, were one ever to possess it: "Suppose the poet discovered and had the power thereafter at will and by intelligence to reconstruct us by his transformations. He would also have the power to destroy s*s"

(N.A., p. ^5)- His hope that the transformations of art will always lead to purity and life moves him to claim that "the imagination...is the next greatest power to faith...in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent" (N.A., p. 171). In the face of all the pressures of reality which crowd upon the soul, causing it to contract, shrivel and die, he offers a vision of the imagination that is "purified, aggrandized, fate­ ful," "How much stature, even vatic stature, this conception gives the poet.1" he exclaims. The theory of analogy has transformed art into a moral discipline:

The extension of the mind beyond the range of the mind, the projection of reality beyond reality, the determin­ ation to cover the ground, whatever it may be, the deter­ mination not to be confined, the recapture of excitement and intensity of interest, the enlargement of the spirit at every time, in every way, these are the unities, the relations, to be summarized as paramount now (N.A., p. 171).

But, as with Valery, so with Stevens, too, the concerns are, in the last analysis, with art:

...when a conversation between Socrates and Phaedrus after death occurs, we somehow expect it to consist of resolutions of our severest philosophical or religious difficulties, or of some of them. The present dialogue, however, is a dis­ cussion of aesthetics. It may even be said to be the apothe­ osis of aesthetics, which is not at all what we have had in mind as that which phantoms talk about (O.P., p. 27^). We respond to Stevens' poetry, as he did to Valery's: we expect the

quest for God to offer "resolutions of our severest philosophical or

religious difficulties." But our expectations are tot satisfied. Other­

wise, the "axes of the prism," the geometric structure, would have been all there was to Stevens' theory of art, and his poetry might perhaps have belonged in the class of dreary "philosophical poems" which plod

tirelessly from one concept to another. Although Stevens speaks kindly

of "Pilgrim's Progress," one feels that he really has no use for the

Interpreter, and that ”...we are distracted by the double sense of the analogy and we are rather less engaged by the symbols than we are by what is symbolized" (N.A., p. 109). The "other meaning divides our at­ tention" instead of unifying it, "and this diminishes our enjoyment of the story," instead of intensifying it. For art, Stevens believes, is not a "collection of primitive woodcuts" that Bunyan produces, but pris­ matic crystallizations."

As it was Stevens' purpose in "A Collect of Philosophy" to "Dismiss the philosophical poem as irrelevant, and yet at the same time to point out the perfection latent in it" (O.P., p. 188), mine in these pages has been to sketch those devices in Stevens' aesthetic which articulate mean- ing and order. In the following pages, I observe how he "subtilizes" that order, transforming the "other meaning"— which in Pilgrim's Progress

"dogged the symbol like its shadow"— into a "pleasant shadow, faint, and volatile." One of the chief powers of poetry, for Stevens, is to achieve an effect of excitement, purity, and wonder. And, for this task, as he writes in "Imagination as Mue," the poet "needs... everything that the imagination has to give" (N.A., p. 1 5 6 ). 72

"Through Illusion which gathers." What then is the special power of poetry? It is, of course, to express the meaning articulated by the

"gradus ad Metaphoram." But the hierarchy of realities described in the preceding page evolved into forms that are intentionally vague and ambi­ guous. The theory that justifies and describes them is most problematic and ambitious. There are moments, indeed, when Stevens seems to object to any analysis of poetry: "...poetry...gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane. If the poem had meaning and if its explanation destroyed the meaning, should we have gained or lost?" (O.P., p. 223).

Critics have often claimed that his poems express only rarefied sensa­ tions or images. But Stevens himself believed that, "The morality of the poet's radiant and productive atmosphere is the morality of the right sensation" (N.A., p. 58)• The major vice of the imaglst poet, Stevens writes, is that he fails to realize that "Not all objects are equal"

(N.A., p. l6l).

Yet he Insists that poems do communicate meanings which are there to be understood: "It would be fantastic to suggest that the overt mean­ ing, what the poem seems to say, contributes little to the artistic sig­ nificance and merit of a poem (O.P., p. 237)•

In the essay "About One of Marianne Moore's Poems," Stevens writes that he firmly objects to formulating the meaning of a poem in terms of any "moral or religious truth." Those who read him superficially be­ lieve that he does not Intend to express any truths whatsoever. Yet, for one thing, the major theme of product as abstraction establishes his affinity to Plato's withdrawal "from the unsubstantial, fluctuating facts of the world about usV and his communion "with objects which are apprehen- 73

ded "by thought and not sense." He writes that up to a point "both he and

Marianne Moore share this philosophy. But he explains his fundamental

disagreement with Platonism on decisive moral grounds:

...poetry has to do with reality in that concrete and individual aspect of it which the mind can never tackle altogether on its own terms, with matter that is foreign and alien in a way in which abstract systems, ideas in which we detect an inherent pattern, a structure that belongs to the ideas themselves, can never be. It is never familiar to us in the way in which Plato wished the con­ quests of the mind to be. On the contrary its function, the need which it meets and which has to be met in some way in every age that is not to become decadent or barbarous is precisely this contact with reality as it impinges on us from the outside, the sense that we can touch and feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolve itself into the con­ ceptions of our minds (O.P., pp. 236-237). (Italics mine.)

"Abstract systems...ideas in which we detect an inherent pattern, a

structure that belongs to the ideas themselves," become familiar and available, perhaps too available, almost as though they were cliches.

This "conquest of the mind" for Stevens signals a decadence; for it

implies that philosophers believe their ideas express an objective view

of the structure of reality. No man, Stevens believed, can know beyond a shadow of a doubt what that structure is. All he can do is to express his "particular sense of the world" and create "his particular reality."

But the philosopher and scientist, who have more faith in their concepts than they do in experience, search for a law that will describe the

structure of the "ding an sich"— the isolated bleak fact that Stevens maintains we cannot know except in connection with "something other"— and the causal connection among all particulars.

For Stevens, the measure of any man's greatness is his conviction that such a law does not exist, that an element of freedom inherent in the scheme of the universe precludes the possibility of formulating a valid law of causation. In "A Collect of Philosophy," Stevens lauds

Planck for expressing intimations of freedom in his final work "The

Concept of Causality in Physics.11 Quoting Andre George on Planck’s concession that "the law of causality is neither true nor false," Ste­ vens summarizes George's account as follows: "...this conclusion is far away from the rigid concept, firmly determinist, which seemed up to now to constitute Planck's belief. He calls it a nuance, but a nuance of importance, worth being signalized" (O.P., p. 202). It was the poet in

Planck that observed the nuance. It is the purest poet who, being true to that nuance, expresses it consummately as "allusion" and "ambiguity."

He insists that to destroy freedom is to destroy life itself by formu­ lating a law of causation which denies that at every millionth of a second an infinite number of unprecedented particulars are being born.

The poet cannot, therefore, conceptualize (fix) meanings; likelife it­ self, he must liberate more illusions of meanings than can ever beab­ stracted and articulated.

In "Two or Three Ideas" Stevens describes the quality of meanings— the effects of meanings— expressed by the poetic concept within the poem. "La vie anterieure" by Baudelaire evokes this response:

The idea of an earlier life is like the idea of a later life, or like the idea of a different life, part of the classic repertory of poetic ideas. It is part of one's inherited store of poetic subjects. Precisely, then, because it is traditional and because we understand its romantic nature and know what to expect from it, we are suddenly and profoundly touched when we hear it declaimed by a voice that says: I lived, for long, under huge porticoes. to Summer” and “The Rock,” he decides finally that the only spiritual goal worthy of "belief is a truth that Issues from the experiencing of an almost non-human state of being: one that is abstracted, purified, disembodied, purged of virtually all human qualities. For this condi­ tion most nearly approximates partaking of the being of God. Since the distinctive characteristics of each group of poems can be disclosed only if one observes in chronological order the individual stages of those beliefs whose definition is in the process of evolving, to account for all of the poems according to the meanings of the final poems perforce distorts the early poetry. I have chosen, therefore, to structure my analysis of Stevens' poetry and prose in terms of a series of definitions

Stevens himself provides for two concepts that stand at both the begin­ ning as well as the end of his career: reality and the imagination.

Initally those terms enable Stevens to establish the relationship be­ tween the poet's and his contemporaries' views of the world. Gradually those definitions of reality and the imagination come to point beyond art and history to establish the relationship between the purest state of being the poet wishes to achieve and that state of being which he can realistically expect to enjoy.

The concepts reality and Imagination have been superficially under­ stood for three main reasons: first, because none of Stevens' critics has considered in much detail any of the essays he wrote; second, be­ cause nocone has observed in detail the changes going on from one stage of his career to another. Third, no one has even questioned why the words "reality" and "imagination” were so important to Stevens; why, for 75

It is as if we had stepped into a ruin and were startled by a flight of birds that rose as we entered. The fami­ liar experience is made unfamiliar and from that time on, whenever we think of that particular scene, we remember how we held our breath and how the hungry doves of another world rose out of nothingness and whistled away (O.P., pp. 203- 20i<.). ~

We are startled not merely by what the poem means, but also because we

realize that the poet has expressed miraculous illuminations of the

familiar. We expect to see in the poem one of the ''cemeteries of

nobility" and are startled by the birds, rising, elevating the poetic

idea. To fix the flux of things is to sense a ruin, desolate and bare,

where "no birds sing."

Stevens believed that the artist must achieve a special "integra­

tion" which makes unity a qualitative, a spiritual achievement, described

most accurately as harmony. Instead of being enhanced by the concept,

such unity is often destroyed whenever the concept protrudes, as it were,

beyond the poem. The philosophical poem, or an allegory such as "Pil­

grim's Progress," expresses the story and the "other meaning" as though

they were parallel horizontal lines. For Stevens, the poem does not

express fixed parallels because, although there is a "level of nature,"

there is, as Stevens maintained, no level of the imagination. When he writes that it does not exist, he means that he would not want to have

it in the first place. For, to say that the imagination has a level is to imply that it is fixed and, as a result, perhaps, that art— express­

ing certain undeniable truths— is regulated by alien standards. If its boundaries are defined, it loses its freedom of Reeling and expression and ceases therefore to exist. The imagination ascends beyond nature into a heavenly sphere, not

of ideas, but of illusions. Some of the most common synonyms for "il­

lusions” identify the ideas of purity and elevation with colors bleached

to a blinding radiance: with illuminations, crystallizations, purities

beyond definition, enchantments, radiant and pure atmospheres. This

unity of the sensuous and the spiritual first touches us through our

senses:

The man who loves New England, and particularly Connecticut loves it precisely because of the spare colors, the thin light, the delicacy and slightness and beauty of the place. The dry grass on the thin surfaces would soon change to a lime-like green and later to an emerald brilliance in a sunlight never too full (O.P., p. 295) •

Dazzling whiteness fulfills one of our greatest needs: to experience

some form of purity. The poet elevates the idea of whiteness by

creating gods and goddesses to dwell in that radiance; or, if they can no longer sustain our belief, then the poet creates the "impossible possible philosopher, the glass man." "...the celestial residences are not matters of chance. Their fundamental glory is the fundamental glow ry of men and women, who being in need of it, create it, elevate it, without too much searching of its identity" (O.P., p. 208, italics mine)..

Probing beyond veils of illusion, the poet feels that he is in "a state of vague receptivity" which resemble* "...one part of something that is dependent on another part, which he is not quite able to specify (O.P., p. 197t italics mine). The "vague receptivity" which the poet feels in beginning to compose his poem is evoked in the reader who cannot account for his response in terms of anything specific. It is something ambiguous that produces this effect, achieved through a fusion of diver­ gent elements within the poem. 77

Ambiguity is described most frequently as issuing from a "balancing

(a stasis or an armistice) of reality and the imagination. It is also \

the fusion of something specific and something vague, a harmonizing of

two worlds: "our world" that is familiar, corporeal, commonplace; and

the "poet's sense of the world" which is abnormal, unreal, unfamiliar.

Stevens describes the extent to which the fusion occurs:

We could not speak of our world as something to be dis­ tinguished from the poet's sense of it unless we objec­ tified it and recognized it as having an existence apart - from the projection of his personality, as land and sea, sky and cloud. He himself desires to make the distinction as part of the process of realizing himself. Once the dis­ tinction has been made, it becomes an instrument for the exploration of poetry. By means of it we can determine the relation of the poet to his subject. This would be simple if he wrote about his own world. We could compare it with ours. But what he writes about is his sense of our world. (O.P., p. 119).

Personality and sensibility— most elusive elements to define— are

fused with the sensuous world to create the "morality of the right

sensation."

I know what is meant by nervous sensibility, as, when at a concert, the auditors, having composed themselves and resting there attentively, hear suddenly an outburst on the trumpets from which they shrink by way of a nervous reaction. The satisfaction that we have when we look out and find that it is a fine day or when we are looking at one of the limpid vistas of Corot in the pays de Corot seems to be something else. It is commonly said that the origins of poetry are to be found in the sensibility (W.A., pp. 163-16*0.

The possibility of ever being able to define the meaning of a poem be­

comes more remote than ever when he describes the synthesis of person­ ality and style, and, in the end, writes of the music of poetry. It is,

furthermore, the most obscure contemporary music, and not the diverti- menti of Haydn that is expressed in our poetry. 78

It is simply that there has "been a change in the nature of vhat we mean hy music. It is like the change from Haydn to a voice intoning. It is like the voice concealed, so that we cannot identify him, who speaks with a measured voice which is often disturbed by his feeling for what he says... What has this music to do with analogy? ...it is like finding our way through the dark not by aid of any sense, but by an instinct that makes it possible for us to move quickly when the music moves quickly, slowly when the music moves slowly. It is a speed that carries us on and through every winding once more to the world outside of the music at its conclusion. It affects our sight of what we see and leaves it ambiguous, somewhat like one thing, somewhat like another (N.A., pp. 125-126^ italics mine).

The poetic prose of this passage conjures the image of some shadowy be­ ing fatally attracted to something that he can hardly even perceive.

He proceeds toward it, slowly, cautiously, and then by degrees more and more quickly. We feel the anxiety of uncertainty, of something dread­ ful that is concealed; and the world becomes "ambiguous, somewhat like one thing, somewhat like another." More than that, this passage suggests the mind hypnotically drawn beyond the real into a quickening sense of the power and mystery of "a reality not our own." Illusions gather thickly round like dark clouds and the poet is "disturbed by his feeling for what he says." It is as though he had intimations of a source of power and that instinctively he was determined to search for it until he found it.

One of the two theories of poetry that Stevens believes contempor­ ary poets subscribe to discloses a commitment that is strongly implied in the above passage.

One relates to the imagination as a power within him not so much to destroy reality at will as to put it to his own uses. He comes to feel that his imagination is not wholly his own but that it may be part of a much larger, 7 9

much more potent imagination, which it is his affair to try to get at. For this reason, he pushes on and lives, or tries to live, as Paul Valery did, on the verge of consciousness. This often results in poetry that is mar­ ginal, subliminal (N.K., p. 115).

It is the second theory, however, that Stevens claims be prefers to ad­ here to. Like the first, it too is an expression of a sort of mysti­ cism. But unlike the first, the second theory summons the poet "away from mysticism toward that ultimate good sense which we term civiliza­ tion." " The second theory relates to the imagination as a power within him to have such insights into reality as will make it possible for him to be sufficient as a poet in the very center of consciousness. This results, or should result, in a central poetry" (N.A., pp. 115-116). In conceiving of the absolute humanistically, Stevens chooses to place him­ self at the center of human consciousness, instead of on the periphery; to see himself in the midst of waking humanity, instead of dreamily, hypnotically surrendering to the enchantments of the pure ideal. The pull of gravity, we realize, is strong in his mind. But when we recall his statement about the music of poetry and his intense admiration for

Valery, who explores the "verge of consciousness," it seems most unlikely that he would choose only one theory, even though he preferred the second to the first. Fo££ after all, if gravity is strenuously expressed in his poetry and thought, so too is grace. What, indeed, does his poetry ex­ press, if not this yearning for purity? And so he probably felt that he had to make that perilous journey to the the "verge of consciousness," if the "center," his home, was to have any real meaning for him. 80

The Heavenly Annihilation

The theory which places the artist on the "verge of consciousness" accounts for the major changes in modern art. It seems to be echoed

in a comment by Klee on Cezanne's aesthetic commitments. Cezanne, he wrote,

'...is one of the chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space— which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function* (N.A., p. 17*0.

Stevens himself agrees with Klee: "that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less" (N.A., p. 17*0. The reality that contemporary art has created has risen from the ashes of poetic annihilation. Borrowing a term from Simone Weil, Stevens refers to this theory of art as "decreation:"

She (Simone Weil) says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revela­ tions are not the revelations of belief, but the pre­ cious portents of our own powers (W.A., p. 175, italics mine).

In one passage, Stevens suggests how this new aesthetic may have re­ sulted from a change in religious beliefs. The focus, he implies, has shifted from adoration of the highest reality (God) to attempting to discover what it might be; poetry, consequently, has been transformed from the act of celebration to the art of perception.

The material world, for all the assurances of the^e, has become immaterial. It has become an image in the 81

mind. The solid earth disappears and the whole atmosphere is subtilized not by the arrival of some venerable beam of light from an almost hypothetical star but by a breach of reality. What we see is not an external world but an image of it and hence an internal world (O.P., p. 191)•

The "hypothetical star" which once cast its "venerable beam of light" upon the world has been the metaphor for the ascent in painting and also in Stevens' poems in "Harmonium.” The distances of that beam from the earth are indeed the "gradus ad Metaphoram." But in modern painting,

Stevens observes that the highest reality exists not "above" the level of nature, but within nature.

The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a my­ stical theology, or, more simply a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them (N.A., pp. 173-17^> italics mine).

If the highest reality exists within reality (behind appearances) instead of above it, the world of appearances must be fractured so that the real­ ity can be discovered. Music and poetry can record the stages at which this process takes place. But ^ain^ing can record only one stage in the process. The painter may choose to show the very beginnings of that transformation. Of, if he chooses, he may shock his audience by trans­ forming reality with a sudden violence and, like Picasso, conjure "a horde of destructions" (N.A., p. l6l).

Picasso has a violence that Stevens finds "intimidating." "Picasso has a subject, a subject that devours him and devastates his region!'

(N.A., p. 120). And so he chooses to speak of Cezanne, whose mode of 82

destruction is serene. He notes that it is "through the reality" in which all things are reflected that one can reach the "reality within the reality." To get at the inner reality, one must imagine sane pres­ sure being applied to concrete things so as to destroy (disfigure, transfigure) them. The results of this pressure are, in varying degrees, violent and calm: dissolution; a softening, a "subtilizing" of reality so that, within, there are numerous porous places from which light can seep out; a crumbling or fracturing of reality to suggest the violence of an earthquake.

Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Ce­ zanne to say: *1 see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall* or 'Planes in color....The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, $he meet­ ing of planes in the sunlight1 (N.A., p. 17^-). / It is as if for both Cezanne and Stevens, light, the sun, were God Who now exists not above the earth shining from a distance, but within each particle of matter, devastating the universe in a divine conflagration.

We might inquire where the artist can evolve from this point, what aesthetic can be more "ultimate" than this one. Perhaps a white canvas s or Mallarme's blank page. The impact of any one of the arts has again and again effected such enormous changes in poetry that it has, at times, almost ceased to exist. But then perhaps the vatic ideal of the "ulti­ mate poem" has inspired the artist to make enormous sacrifices and, in ecstatic self-praise, to take them for supreme achievements. CHAPTER III

HAEMONUK AND CACAPHONY: THE SOUNDS OF NOBILITY

In Harmonium, Stevens develops all the themes that are central, if in an Increasingly complicated way: death, romance, Belief, art, nohllity.

I reorder the poems in Harmonium in this chapter to Bring into relief the major life-pattern reflected throughout all of his poetry: creation,

Breakdown, and reconstruction. The cycle of disbelief, war, armistice, and Belief is repeated Interminably. In my discussion of Harmonium. I consider first Stevens' poems of fear and ugliness, then those where the spirit makes a quick recovery from despair, thereupon the golden age where a vision of the Beautiful and the good is momentarily sustained, only to Be corroded in the final poems of this chapter By the fierce as­ sault of disbelief.

The complication of the life-pattern is expressed in the ceaseless dialectic Between reason and the imagination. In the first group of poems I discuss in this chapter, the imagination is driven from things ignoble and ugly, unworthy of Belief. Then in the poems that I next discuss, the mind Believes for a moment in the enduring Beauty of the

Body, as in that most appollonlan poem "Peter Quince at the Clavier."

Soon, however, the Body's Beauty fades, withering under the impact of time and death. It is with the real event of death, the subject I next discuss, the mind in the act of realizing that the imagination's desire to Believe in the immortality of the Body as well as the soul is un­ realistic and must Be abandoned. Finally, in the last group of poems

I discuss, the imagination's Belief in the unreal, which upsets the

83 81+ balance between It and reality (reason), must be renounced. Season, therefore, deflates the imagination, so that like the noble rider who

soared too high into the sky, It suddenly falls once again to earth,

realizing that It cannot yield itself to belief. 3he Imagination ca­ pitulates to the demands of reason In "Sunday Morning" and "Le Monocle do Mon Oncle." And the balancing of Imagination and reality, the armi­ stice, is sadly, bitterly achieved.

In the poems that come after the Harmonium group, the Imagination once again soars, into the sky; Indeed, It aspires for far more lofty goals than It did in Harmonium. It becomes so romantic, so unrealistic, so Impossible, that forces stronger than death and comic ugliness are needed to bring It back rudely to reality. And that Is why In "The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens summons a monster to help him chain down the necessary angel of the Imagination. The historical pattern of war, armistice and golden age recur to the very end of his career, each Image of war more horrible than the last, and each vision of beauty and per­ fection thereby more breathtaking and sublime.

"C'etalt mon esprit batard, l'lgnomlnie"

In the group of poems I discuss In this section, the poet Is devoured by a vision of life which is ugly, grim, and destructive; such a vision degrades the spirit, transforming It Into a niggardly, mean, debasing force, rather than one which liberates and Is llfe-glvlng. There Is some question from the beginning whether the spirit decides what reality example, Stevens might not have been content to celebrate only the imag­

ination; why it had finally to be for him reality and the imagination,

and not one without the other. In insisting that imagination and reality

were equally Important to art, Stevens maintained that the values and dis­

coveries the poet makes and affirms are not subjective observations

whose truth is relative only to himself. Although he wanted to be the

one to discover God, the particular, he always maintained that the ab­

solute would either be an image of everyone— himself Included— or of

no one at all. The poetic imagination then, he saw as only part of a

nameless and immense truth; if he was ever to know this universal truth,

he would have to go beyond himself to understanding "something other."

For him there were various orders of reality: human, in nature, non-

human. His intention was to understand each on its own terms, and,

thereupon, to establish the correspondence among all of them. - The truth

worthy of belief, therefore, was not egocentric. Truth for him had to be universal— a set of correspondences among all orders of reality—

and to be so objective that it could survive the most rigorous tests of

logic.

Reality, therefore, in the most basic sense in which Stevens uses

this term, is an inherent characteristic of the human mind: reason, which constantly curbs the imagination, eager to Indulge Itself in wish-fulflllments. As Stevens writes again and again, he is a romantic to whom the most powerful force in the world is the imagination. But he maintains emphatically that without reason, which checks the excesses of the imagination, nothing that the imagination does can have any Is going to toe or whether the imagination has toeen degraded toy the pres­

sures of an lgnotole reality. In the strange poem "Frogs Eat Butterflies.

Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Hen Eat Hogs" (C.P., p. 78), the

"indolent and arid" man is devoured toy nature; tout nature itself, the

"swine-like rivers," "suckle themselves on his arid toeing." The rivers

go "seaward" to the "sea-mouth," as all devouring things are consumed toy

something greater than themselves. The source of ugliness resides tooth

in nature and in man, which feed off each other to toreed even more ugly

shapes than themselves.

Ugliness, deeply set within the sensuous world, twists the poetic

genius of "The Weeping Burgher” (C.P., p. 6l). For him the world Is

dull and sordid. How tantalizing, he thinks, if he would distort it out

of shape, falsify reality so that morose termagents could appear as radi­

ant as virgins, and buffoons and n'er-do-wells could ride in a tolack bar­

ouche— as paterfamilias. But he will not destroy things as they are,

even while he cannot survive without having them as he wants them Ideally

to toe. He is a poet in search of a subject, Stevens' first image of the

disinherited poet, who becomes the major persona of his poems. Distraught

and raving, he is caught in an evocation of diabolism unleashed for a mo­ ment in a memorable image of poet turned mad magician: "I weeping in a

calcined heart,/ My hands such sharp imagined things."

The pity aroused toy the figure of the weeping burgher is dispelled

for the "disbeliever” who walks toy the "Palace of the Babies” (p. 77),

casting a cold, destructive eye upon the "gates of hammered serafin" which degrades the moonlight, transforming it into "moon-tolotches on 8 6

the vails." While for Stevens the mind cannot sustain belief In some­ thing patently unreal without appearing ludicrous, at the same time the man who refuses to believe in anything beautiful— even when It Is right before his eyes— lives In stark Isolation:

The walker In the moonlight walked alone, And each blank window of the building balked His loneliness and what was In his mind.

This, then, Is the first Image of stark loneliness, Isolation and blank­ ness that Stevens conjures In his poetry. It is directly related to the failure to believe In things that are beautiful and good. Before

one discusses the means by which Stevens suggests that belief can be resuscitated, one must observe the price his characters pay for continu­ ing disbelief. The consequences of disbelief are pain and panic, a mind made "dark," where "The clambering wings of birds of black revolved,/

Making harsh torment of the solitude." The ravaging effects of disbe­ lief are not confined to sensations of ugliness and the grotesque; they oppress the spirit so that, tormented by Insomnia and deep anxiety, It

Is a prisoner of Its self-imposed loneliness.

The darkness of solitude is frightfully Illumined In "Domination of

Black" (p. 8), when the poet, seated by the fire at night, seems to see leaves arising from the fire, "turning In the wind." He Is terrified by the phantasmagorical illusions evoked by the fire In the dark room, red against black. The "colors of the bushes/ And of the fallen leaves" keep moving ceaselessly as though frantically escaping from some perse­ cutor. The "fallen leaves" make him think of peacocks flaring their feathers. Feathers and leaves swirling "over the room" confuse him, cause him to panic. His soul vould take flight from "the color of the

heavy hemlocks" which confidently, boldly "came striding.” The hysteria

In desiring to escape is expressed in stanza three, as five successive

lines begin with a form of the verb "turn.” But he cannot escape; he

seems Instead to be turning perpetually in circles, unable to break through his jangled emotions to run in any direction at all. He not

only sees and feels but hears the swirling motion everywhere: "In the wind," "in the fire,” which Is "loud” like the wind. The fire rages as peacock feathers flash through the darkness. To control motion gone mad,

the poet trlee to ask a few coherent questions, but the questions only

add to his panic:

Has It a cry against the twilight/ Or against the leaves themselves..•/ Or was It a cry against the hemlocks?

Are the peacocks, then, crying out against themselves, or the colors the poet has imagined and then assumed are real? Absurd! Yet, outside the window, even the planets seem to turn hysterically In the wind and the night to come striding like the hemlock. His Imaginings swell to enor­ mous proportions. The Imagination's hallucinated order comes for him to be the pattern of nature. And yet a grain of reason is still alive, ex­ pressed as the striving to check motion, to gain composure, to ask him­ self questions which, caught up In the "pressure of events,” he cannot even comprehend, much less answer.

It Is chaotic energy, the deadly antagonist of the mind, which seeks a state of composure and serene tranquillity, that is expressed so power­ fully in this poem. Tranquillity Is the apollonlan calm that is one of tilt highest Ideals in Stevens' art. As I shall observe, it is precisely the state of mind of the lady in the first few lines in "Sunday Morning,” but her composure is soon upset by sceptical questioning. Tranquillity, furthermore, is the state of mind that the speaker in "Le Monocle de

Mon Oncle," a victim of time, wishes to achieve. But try as he will to gain the comfort of tranquillity that he seeks, he is at best calmned and not genuinely serene. For Stevens, tranquillity is genuine only when a man has wisely absorbed the experience of destruction; as his po­ ems in "Farts of a World" and "Transport to Sumer" disclose, it can ne­ ver be a mere mechanism of escape. Genuine tranquillity, then, must be achieved only after one has thrust himself deeply into "the pressures of reality" and, surviving, has achieved a wisdom that transcends the experience Itself. The lady in "Sunday Morning" and the monocled uncle, however, have yet to learn this.

But of all Stevens' characters in Harmonium. Crispin in "The Come­ dian as the Letter C" (p. 27) has the most to learn. Crispin has only one saving grace as an artist: the desire to perfect himself. Indeed, the theme of self-perfection that Is strongly articulated in Stevens' final poems is first expressed in "The Comedian...." Crispin has an a- bidlng faith in the noble capacity of the mind to do great things. With a pompous strut of phrase he begins thus: "Nota: man is the Intelligence of his soil." The power of the human mind, that is, makes of man a kind of sovereign. In section VI, "The Idea of a Colony," he writes: "Nota: his soil is man's intelligence." The substance has changed; the form is the same. In fact, the form, the style, remains static throughout 89 the poem. What, then, 1b the style, the form of Crispin's thought? And vhat shape does the substance of thepoem take?

In the very beginning of the poem the Intelligence of man, for Cris­ pin, is demonstrated by his capacity to philosophize about snails, be the

"musician, of pears," devise the "princlplum” and execute the "lex." But

Stevens will not let Crispin get away with such delusions of grandeur without a few of his own snide remarks. He stands outside Crispin's mind, assessing and ridiculing the letter's thoughts and actions, and fades in and out of scenes unobtrusively so that formally he la only barely dis­ cernible from CriBpin himself. He interrupts Crispin before he can con­ tinue:

Sed quaerltur: is this same wig Of things, this nlncompated pedagogue, Preceptor to the sea?

Crispin is preceptor to the sea, if, of course, one can say that he be­ gins a meaningful encounter with the sea when he studies "the sllentlous porpoises, whose snouts/ Dibbled in waves that were mustachlos." A dan- diesque Jack-of-all-trades, he is a small-town barber; like Candlde, tends his "simple salad-bed^" and then has a most casual, spare-tlme connoisseur's eye for art.

Still he is a malcontent. For It Is not the "snug hibernal from that sea and salt" that he desires: "What counted was mythology of self/ Blotched out beyond blotching." What counts most for him is puri­ fication and perfection. Crispin, then, is the very first of Stevens' t characters who desires to perfect himself until he Is an abstraction.

He wants to divest himself of all artifice and falsity, of "the bellow­ ing breeches, cloak/ Of China, cap of Spain, Imperative haw/ Of hum:" for he has deep faith that vhen all the artifice is gone, it vill reveal the core of him powerful, with the strength of a lion, the magnitude of the sea. In the powerful baptism of the sea, he

now beheld himself, A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. What word split in dickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt?

What word? Surely not "Crispin," but only the repetition of "C" to which the comedian has been reduced by a process Stevens would later call 'hb- straction." For

The whole of life that still remained in him Dwindled to one sound strumming in his ear, Ubiquitous concussion, slap and sigh, Polyphony beyond his baton’s thrust.

The sea, instead of making a poet of him, has all but destroyed him.

For Instead of the "watery realist" refining Crispin's desire for beauty, making it strong, bold, attached to significant things and not to pears and snails, the sea has washed away from Crispin almost all desire for things that are beautiful. Reason has virtually destroyed Crispin's ima­ gination. ttiere is only one aspect of potential nobility that remains, existing at the beginning and the end of his career: his delusions of grandeur, which permit ihim to elevate himself— even as he desires above all to conceive of the world starkly, stripped of any romantic aggrandize­ ments.

Crispin, then, strives to "stem" what he takes to be the "verboseness in the sea," to limit the sea to "one sound strumming in his ear." But he cannot be preceptor to the sea. For the sea is indescribably melodious, elevated by Stevens in the most beautiful lines in the poem. The poetry chanted by the see is rich with tender compassionate music, "A convoca­

tion, nightly of the seastars." It is a sad, melodious sound mournfully

chanting Its memory of ancient disaster, nothing less than the death of

the God Triton: "A sunken voice both of remembering/ And of forgetful­

ness, in alternate strain." Just as Triton dissolved, so, writes Ste­

vens, "ancient Crispin was dissolved." He does not, of course, mean our

Crispin, the comedian. But referring to him lmmediatly thereafter, he

records that "The valet In the tempest was annulled." Triton, the god,

and Saint Crispin, both historical particulars, dissolved one day in

thin air. But the Idea of the sea god and the Idea of the saint still

obtain, as the Instinct of nobility apart from its manifestations. The

present historical particular, valet-Crlspln, Is simply not worthy of

replacing the form of Crlspln-saint. But perhaps there Is something

enobling In Crispin's ceaseless quest for self-perfection, even if It

leads him progressively in the wrong direction.

He is willing austerely to tolerate the deadliest discipline, in

order to achieve

...some starker, barer self In a starker, barer world, in which the sun Has not the sun because it never shone With bland complaisance on pale parasols...(p. 29).

He wants, truly, to have the mind of winter, like Stevens' snow man (C.

£•> P* 9)* That, for him, would be purification and perfection. Car­

icaturing the melodrama of his efforts, Stevens writes:

Here was the veritable ding an slch, at last, Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing, But with a speech belched out of hoary darks Noway resembling his, a visible thing, And excepting negligible Triton, free From the unavoidable shadow of himself. Nov at last he has supposedly a vision of the absolute, one that does not mirror his own Image but rather "the veritable ding an slch.” Indeed,

Crispin himself Is reduced to that anonymous shape, to a being that Is not his, free from the "unavoidable shadow of himself"— free and yet, because an unavoidable freedom, not altogether free. He is free, Indeed, from the necessary angel of the Imagination, so that finally, triumphing over romance, he can praise himself In excess of the facts, as the rest of the narrative will bear out only too veil: "The last distortion of romance/ Forsook" him. These are Stevens' words, ironically Imitating the self-assessment that Crispin vould make. The key vord Is "sever­ ance." Crispin and his angelic double (the Imagination) are ripped apart. And, as far as a possible maturation of an artistic vision is concerned, Crispin's future is a thing of the past. Although he contin­ ues to live, dreams of founding a colony, becomes a hermit, finally takes a wife and begets four daughters, as far as the Imagination Is concerned, he Is, from the moment that he is washed clean by the sea, a dead man. He, Indeed, more dead than the god Triton "lnconpllcate with that/ Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,/ Except In faint, memorial gesturing,/ That were like arms and shoulders In the waves.”

But as for Crispin himself, like the famous comic butts of eighteenth- century satire whose fcame he Is given, he is completely unaware he has been destroyed before he managed to make It back to land.

As though Indulging Crispin's desire for praise, Stevens theatrically praises him: ^"Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new." He has, of course, been ruined In the process. For "The imagination, here, could 93 not evade,/ In poems of plums, the strict austerity/ Of one vast, subju­ gating, final tone." Crispin has fortuitously discovered his sense of the world— namely, that the Imagination must plunge below the level of reality, rather than above It. The irony, of course, is that the Imagi­ nation, rebelling against Crispin's Ignoble injunctions, keeps asserting

Itself in arabesque distortions. All the while Crispin's deepest desire, now, is to become a realist; but in spite of all of his efforts, from his

"swift destruction" he emerges not the "starker barer self," but rather

"this gaudy, gusty panoply" intent on being a starker, barer self.

In the Yucatan, the first land he chances upon after the trauma inflicted by the sea, the old illusory forms seem entirely annulled. For

Crispin is alienated from the local poetB who like the "thin men of Sad­ dam” in "thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" imagine "golden birds”

(p. 39)j do not see the "hawk and falcon, green toucan/ And jug...” in their own place. Stevens writes with oblique criticism: ”...Crispin was toodestitute to find/ In any commonplace the sought-for aid." It was not indeed, as Stevens wryly implies, that Crispin rejects the com­ monplace a ad thereby brings about his own destruction. Rather, having been a guardian of snails for too long a time, he is done with the com­ monplace once and for all. Of his desire for a grandiose theme for his poetry, Stevens writes ironically: "How greatly had he grown in his de­ mesne,/ This auditor of insectsi" Having enough of the connonplace, he bids his farewells to beauty, tenderness, romantic love— the tranquil themes of nature celebrated by romantic poets: 9h

The stride of vanishing autumn In a park By way of decorous melancholy; he That wrote his couplet yearly to the spring, As dissertation of profound delight, Stopping, on voyage, In a land of snakes Found his vicissitudes had much enlarged His apprehension (p. 31)*

Reality makes him hold: "His violence was for aggrandizement/ And not

for stupor." He was a free man, like "other freemen...,/ Sonorous nut­

shells rattling Inwardly.” For him the "nohler,...elemental potencies

and pangs" could he expressed only hy "...an aesthetic touch, diverse,

untamed,/ Incredible to prudes, the mint of dirt."

The vision of reality, unmediated hy tenderness, heauty, romance,

comes to him: savage at first, and then, In spite of himself, hy degrees more warm, sensual, familiar— Indeed, anything hut austere:

That earth was like a Jostling festival Of seeds grown fat, too Juicily opulent, Expanding In the gold's maternal warmth.

Crispin, the lion-hearted, becomes "the affectionate emigrant," who finds a "new reality in parrot-squawks•" Again, searching for the elemental, he returns to the trivial, the commonplace, hut It Is now no longer the

golden warbling of the "night-bird," hut the ugly squawking of the par­ rot. Yet are we to condemn him for his change of tastes? Are we to say that this change from the elemental to the trivial necessarily demonstrates a weakening of moral fiber?

With the first rumble of thunder, "Crispin.•.took flight" (p. 32).

And the next we see of him Is In the "snug hibernal” of the "cathedral with the rest.” How absurd this "connoisseur of elemental fate," who, for all his clammerlng about the purity of parrot-squawks and gutteral sounds 95 now becomes "Aware of exquisite thought." Even so, he is still moved by the voice of the storm— mighty, pure, powerful. Safely insulated from the storm, he feels no shame in having retreated into safety. Antici­ pating Crispin's desire to rationalize his action, Stevens writes with irony: "An annotator has his scruples, too." But at this point Crispin does not begin to rationalize. Esther he feels an expansive sense of self-praise and self-importance. "His mind was free/ And more than free, elate, Intent, profound." He is elevated and inspired by the thought that a new "self" is "possessing him,/ That was not in him in the crusty town/ From which he sailed." He Imagines that great things are now ahead for him.

Once again indulging Crispin's enormous vanity, Stevens with mockery wrlteB in part III:

The book of moonlight is not written yet Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room For Crispin.

Will the book ever be written, however? It does not seem so, "For the legendary moonlight.••once burned/ In Crispin's mind” but no longer does.

Although he goes "through sweating changes," he will never refine the imagination, having striven from the beginning to destroy it. Grandilo­ quently, mockingly, Stevens writes:

How many poems he denied himself In how observant progress, lesser things Than the relentless contact he desired.

After a brief spell in the north (which by the standards of the tropical

Yucatan seems "Artie”), he decides upon a "flourishing tropic." But au­ sterely he wants the things he will see there "not rarefied/ Nor refined