52
PARTISAN REVIEW
else out. One beautiful line in particular in "Owl's Clover" ("The sound
of z in the grass all day") emphasizes by contrast how little direct ob-
servation there is in Stevens. There is no specific scene, nor time, nor
action, but only the mind moving among its meanings and replying to
situations which are referred to, but not contained in, the poem itself.
"Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds," another poet writes, "The woman
keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish
gutter." By thus placing the fact within the poem, the response to the
fact gains immeasurable strength and relevance. In Stevens, however, the
poet "strides" "among the .cigar stores, Ryan's lunch, hatters, insurance
and medicines" without convincing the reader that he is walking on an
actu'll ~treet. There is always an abstractness present; everything is
turned into an object of the imagination. Certain weaknesses result: the
word-play does not always escape the adventitious frivolity for which
it is always mistaken by the careless reader; the poem is sometimes ex·
tended nu. by a progress of perception, or of meaning, but one word and
one phrase multiplies others; and, to sum up these defects, the poet is
"too poetic." It may also be that the burden of this style is responsible
for the faults which have always been present in Stevens' blank verse,
a lack of variety in going from line to line, a difficulty with overflow, and
lately, in "Owl's Clover," a tendency to anapestic substitution which
unsettles the sonorous Miltonic period.
Virtue and defect, however, seem to be inseparable. The mag·
nificence of the rhetoric necessitates an exclusion of narrative elements,
necessitates the whole weight of the verbalism, and, on the other hand,
makes possible the extreme range and freedom of the symbols. The blue
guitar, the statue, the duck, the greenest continent, and above all the
bread and the stone presented here for the first time are figures and
metaphors of a richness and meaningfulness which justify the method.
The poems taken as a whole constitute a special kind of museum, of
a very familiar strangeness, located, because of the extent of the poet's
awareness, in the middle of everything which concerns us.
DELMORE SCHWARTZ
READING THE SPIRIT.
By Richard Eberhart. New Tork. Oxford
University Press. $2.50.
Mr. Eberhart is not an easy poet; he is too energetic, which he
luckily cannot help, and he fails at critical points to complete his poeIll!
on the page either as examples of perception or as examples of craft,
which is a failure that, luckily, he can help. It is his predicament, and
ours, that his talent has seldom in the particular poem either found a
satisfactory medium or discovered its governing limits. We feel
him
