300
PARTISAN REVIEW
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the irnaginatwn's Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima.
Granting the poet his own style, it could not he better expressed. Mr.
Stevens, like the best of our modern poets, is free master of the fresh
and rejoicing tongue of sensibility and fancy and the experience in flush
and flux and flower; hut he lacks, except for moments, and there, too,
resembles his peers, the power of the "received," objective and authori·
tative imagination, whether of philosophy, religion, myth, or dramatic
symbol, which is what he means by the imagination's Latin. The reader
should perhaps he reminded that
gibberish
is not a frivolous word in
the context; it is a word
manque
more than a word mocking. One gibbers
before a reality too great, when one is appalled with perception, when
words fail though meaning persists: which is precisely, as Mr. Eliot sug·
gested in a recent number of the
Partisan Review,
a proper domain of
poetry.
One does what one can, and the limits of one's abilities are cut
down by the privations of experience and habit, by the absence of what
one has not thought of and by the presence of what is thought of too
much, by the canalisation and evaporation of the will. What is left
is
that which one touches again and again, establishing a piety of the
imagination with the effrontery of repetition. Mr. Stevens has more left
than most, and has handled it with m()fe modulations of touch and more
tenacious piety, so that it becomes itself exclusively, inexplicably, fully
expressive of its own meaning. Of such things he says:
These are not things· transformed
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.
He knows, too,
The fluctuatwns of certainty, the change
Of degrees of perception in the scholar's dark,
which it is not hard to say that one knows, hut which it is astonishing,
always, to see exemplified in images of the seasons, of water·lights, the
colours of flowers in the colours of air, or hirdsong, for they make so
"an abstraction blooded, as a man by thought."
It is all in the garden, perhaps, where the poet's gibberish returns
to the gibberish of the vulgate, and where the intensity of the revelations
of the single notion of redness dispenses, for a very considerable hut
by no means single occasion, with the imagination's Latin.
A lasting visage
in
a lasting bush,
A face of stone in an unending red,
Red·emerald, red·sliued·blue, a face of slate,
