WALLACE STEVENS
85
imagination to levels of a humanism that has been claimed for him
but that he has never actually attained. For a score of years in both
verse and prose St::vens has set the issue in terms of the adequacy of
landscape as fiction, the adjustment of desire to the object, of the
sensibility to intellectual constructs, of the world to the ultimate Plato.
Stevens has spent
his
energies in evading the absolute, the total
fiction. His dread of the glass man- the rational man-his contempt
for metaphysicians sprawling under the August sun, means that he
has set one human faculty- reason--ever against
anoth~r-sensibility
-in a dichotomy that has deprived him of what the poet most needs,
fictions themselves. His plea has always been for the "fiction that
results from feeling," or, as he has lately put it, "a sense that we live
in the center of a physical poetry, a geography that would be intol–
erable except for the non-geography that exists there." To Stevens
philosophy has meant rationalism; he has disregarded the fact that
the most illuminating philosophies always have been touched with
that ultimate Platonic insight, the
arete soterias,
which is not rational–
ity at all, but reason in its most exalted mood-wisdom. To substitute
for any philosophic response ("official" is his word) an entirely tem–
peramental one results in a hypertrophy of the "poetic" sensibility at
the expense of poetic intelligence. "There are also," Socrates is said
to have remarked, "misologists, or haters of ideas." Stevens has always
proclaimed himself a rnisologist. Yvor Winters, by his own hard
analytics, complains of Stevens' system of thoughtlessness, his hedo–
nism. In spite of hedonist impulses, Stevens in really a misologist;
curiously, he is a misologist obsessed by a thesis.
At the very moments when he identifies himself
a~
a native of
the world he has been forced to contend with hateful ideas amid
solid, static objects-the parts of his world. His resolution has been
a law of inherent opposites: "Two things of opposite natures seem
to depend/ On one another." This law is fulfilled through a pagan,
and at times orgiastic, humility before things as they are-the eupho–
ria of being "without a description of to be . .. being an ox."
In "Esthetique du Mal" appears humility of another order,
alien to the earlier Stevens even in his malcontent vein-"Pain
is
human"; this too is "part of the sublime" and involves an imagina–
tive apprehension of the human situation in which he has been de–
ficient. Then the theme is put aside as Stevens returns to his wonted
improvisations, exercises in viewing the world:
The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world.
