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PARTISAN REVIEW
opposition to the complex allusion to traditional denotations. In
Stevens the intimations move directly toward the "fiction" of feeling
beyond and transcending the statement; the fiction dissociates itself
from the object, but not by repercussion. Thus occurs a tone of
reverie that is anti-metaphysical. The reading of Keats' Nightingale
Ode is an experience more akin to the reading of "Peter Quince at
the Clavier" than to reading Eliot.
The romantic dis-equilibrium and slackness of tension may be
illustrated by the extreme imprecisions of passages that may be termed
pseudo-Shakespearian:
...
Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness
...
. . .
desire for day
Accomplished in the immensely flashing East,
Desire for rest, in that descending sea
Of dark, which in its vetry darkening
Is rest and silence spreading into sleep.
In contrast is the imagism that does actually fall inward toward the
object itself; but only toward a visual, auditory, tactile apprehension
of the object, toward sensuous denotations. In brief, the essential
rom.anticism appears in the fracture between Stevens' conceptual,
affective and imagist phases. Objects themselves, sensuously realized,
do not symbolize the "fictions," the affective evocations, radiating be–
yond them; nor do the equivocal concepts terminate in the senses.
His evaluations are temperamental responses through which the world
is "felt."
II
"Esthetique du Mal," the latest variation upon Stevens' theme
that by feeling we live "as and where we live," is scored more som–
berly than might be expected. There appears a new phrase that, if
elaborated, might release him from the patterns of composition and
conception that have bound him almost hypnotically:
Life is a bitter aspic. We are not
At the center of a diamond
...
By this insight Stevens might translate the problem of the poetic
