BOOKS
299
In abort, an abstract fiction can change and, if the abstraction was soundly
conceived, the more it
is
the same the more it will seem to change, and
by the feeling of change in identity, identity in change, give the great
pleasure of access of being.
The man-hero is TWt the exceptional rrwnster,
But he that of repetition is rrwst TTUI.$ter.
These are the bare ·bones of doctrine, and in another poet, most likely
of another age, might exactly have been in control of the motion of the
poem. In Stevens' poem the doctrine is not in control, nor does he pre·
tend that it is; it is not a system, or even an organization, that he provides
us with, but a set of notes brought together and graphed by the convention
of his triad.
If
his notes are united,
il
is pax;tly by the insight that saw
the triad outside the poem, and partly by the sensibility-the clusters
of perceptions, and the rotation of his rosary of minor symbols-into
which he translates it. There is the great unity and the heroic vision in
&he-offing, and they may indeed loom in the night of the poetry, but in
the broad day of it there are only fragments, impressions, and merely
auociated individuations. Their maximum achieved unity is in their
formal circumscription: that they are seen together in the same poem.
Whether a poet could in our time go much further-whether the
speculative
imagination
is possible in our stage of belief-cannot be
argued; there are no examples; yet it seems more a failure of will than
of ability. Certainly Stevens has tackled Socrates' job: the definition of
general terms. Certainly, too, he has seen one of the ways in which the
poet in whom the philosopher has hibernated, muddled in sleep, can go
on with the job: he has seen, in the sensibility, the relations . between
the abstract, the actual, and the imaginative. But he has been contented
or been able only to make all his definitions out of fragments of the
actual, seeing the fragments as transformations of the abstract: each one
u
good, as meaningful, as another, but bound not to each other in
career but only to the centre (the major idea) which includes them. That
ia
why, I think, so many of the fragments are unavailable except in
pauing, and the comprehension of what is passing depends too often upon
apecial knowledge of fashion and gibberish in vocabulary and idiom.
Mr. Stevens himself understands the problem, and has expressed it
characteristically in one of the segments of the decade requiring that the
Fiction change. It is one of the segments, so common in so many poets
of all ages, in which the poet assures himself of the nature and virtue
of poetry: the protesting ritual of re-dedication.
The
poem
goes from the poet's gibberi&h
to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back
again. •.•
Is there a
poem
that
never reaches words
And one that chaffers the time away?
•.•
It is Ike gibbernh of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries
by
a peculiar speech to speak
