BOOKS
NEW VERSE
THE MAN WITH THE BLUE GUITAR, AND OTHER POEMS.
By Wallace
Stevens. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00.
The poems of Wallace Stevens present an elegant surface. It has
been mentioned often, and misunderstood even more frequently, but its
affiliations are fairly clear. The same dandyism of speech and the same
florid irony is to be found in such writers as James Branch Cabell and
Carl Van Vechten, in certain poems of J. C. Ransom and Conrad Aiken,
even in the prose style of Santayana, in the poems of the forgotten
Donald Evans, and going further back in time, in the moonstruck poems
of Dowson, Lafargue, and Verlaine, the Verlaine of "Fetes Gal antes,"
and the Lafargue who sighs that existence is so quotidian. This is a
formidable family, but the resemblances are unmistakeable. They are
also superficial; Stevens has made a significant virtue out of the dubious
verbal habits involved in the tendency from which he seems, in some
way, to have derived his style. He is unquestionably a much better
writer than most of the above authors.
Perhaps it is worthwhile attempting to account for the kinship by
relating Stevens to the
milieu
which must have surrounded him when he
began to write. As a hypothesis, one may suppose that his style crystal-
--'
lized in the days when
The Smart Set
was the leading literary magazine,
when one knew French with pride, discussed sophistication, feared to be
provincial, and aspired to'membership among the elite. The backwash or
lag of that day is still apparent in the Greenwich Village tearom, and one
can scarcely doubt that among the admirers of Miss Millay, there are
some who still exist in that period of time. To be a poet at that time
was to be peculiar; merely to be interested in the arts was to take upon
oneself the burden of being superior, and an exile at home. It may be
that as a result of some such feeling, Stevens called his wonderful dis-
course on love
Le Monocle de Man Oncle,
thus resorting to French,
and thus mocking, as so often in his titles, the poem itself, as if the poet
were extremely self-conscious about the fact of being a poet. It ought to
be added that the title of the poem in question does, nevertheless, have
a distinct meaning in the poem.
In the present volume, Stevens provides another example, the best
one perhaps, of how much there is in his poetry beneath the baroque
decoration. The surface would seem to be a mask, which releases the
poet'svoice, a guise without which he could not speak. But the sentiments
beneath the mask are of a different order. If we rest with our impression
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