298
PARTISAN REVIEW
reached is approached from all round. The poem is like a pie marked
for cutting in three pieces, with an imaginary centre which
is
somehow
limited, if you look long enough, only by the whole circumference. A
triad makes a trinity, and a trinity, to a certain kind of poetic imagina·
tion, is the only tolerable form of unity. I think the deep skills of
imagination, by which insights, ideas, and acts get into poetry, thrive
best when some single, pressing theme or notion is triplicated.
It
is not
a matter of understanding, hut of movement and of identification and of
access of being. The doublet is never enough, unless it breeds. War and
peace need a third phase, as liquid and ice need vapor to fill out and
judge the concept of water, as God the Father and God the Son need
the Holy Ghost, or hell and heaven need purgatory, or act and place need
time. The doublet
needs
what it makes. This is a habit of creative mind.
Mr. Stevens has acquired that habit. Wanting, as we all do, a
supreme fiction, wanting, that is, to conceive, to imagine, to make a
supreme being, wanting, in short, to discover and objectify a sense of
such a being, he sets up three phases through which it must pass. It
must he abstract; it must change; it must give pleasure. Each phase is
conceived as equal in dimension, each being given in ten sections of
seven three-lined stanzas; and each phase is conceived as a version of
the other two, that is, with a mutual and inextricable rather than with
a successive relationship.
Let
us see what the elements of the Fiction look like when taken
separately. It must, the poet argues, he abstract, beyond, above, and at
the beginning of our experience, and it must he an abstract idea of
being,
which when ·fleshed or blooded in nature or in thought, will absorb all
the meanings we discover. That is to say, it must
he
arche-typical and a
source, an initiator of myth and sense, and also a reference or judgment
for myth and sense; it tends to resemble a Platonic idea in character
and operation, and its natural prototype, its easiest obvious symbol, will
he the sun. But it must change in its abstractness, depending on the
experience of it, as a seraph turns stayr "according to his thoughts";
for if it did not change it would tend to disappear or at least to become
vestigial. You take character from what is not yourself and participate
in what changes you. The process of change is the life of being, like
abstraction, requires constant iteration and constant experience. Most
of all the Fiction must change because change is the condition of per·
ception, vision, imagination. "A fictive covering/weaves always glistening
from the heart and mind." What changes is the general, the instances
of the abstract, a:s they strike a fresh or freshened eye. That is why this
fiction which changes, and is abstract, must give pleasure; it must he
always open to discovery by a fresh eye, which is the eye of pleasure,
the eye of feeling and imagination, envisaging the "irrational distortion."
Thars
it:
the more than rational distortion,
The fiction thal results from feeling.
