86
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thus the "Esthetique" reiterates the plea that "the genius of the body,
which is our world," be not "spent in the false engagements of the
mind." Yet it is difficult to accept the structure of things for the
structure of ideas, and he stands in need of fictions by which to live
"as and where we live."
·
III
Here is the central problem in Stevens: the imagination in the
Waste Land. Essentially Stevens has remained a poet of the Waste
Land-disillusioned as to the gods, June evenings and Moscow. Like
Eliot, he has set the issue:
The prologues are over. It is a question, now,
Of final belief. So, say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
Stevens cannot choose; his fictions are unreliable since they prov(
to be merely his sensitivities. Two alternatives are possible: to
gri}
"the essential prose" as his Crispin attempted, or to establish a fictior.
so absolute that its hegemony over the sensibilities is total. Stevem
avails himself of neither because he devotes himself to paganism and
obscurantism, "the fiction that results from feelings." The conse–
quences are the optimism that causes Stevens uneasiness whenever he
realizes that pain is human, and the futility of his turning to the
spring sun while "employer and employee contend." His most co!].–
centrated effort is in seeing the world in a dish of peaches. He is de–
prived of nightingales, and is "weary of the man that thinks"; so
the poet must offer the supreme fictions.
All obscurantist and pagan Stevens belongs to the post-World–
War-! era. His cynicism about the bourgeoisie, his uncertainty on
larger social issues, his depreciation of the gods, his discovery that
"the door / of earth penetrates more deeply than any word," his
measuring the world by the eye suggest the practised fleshliness of the
'twenties, paganism at Hartford. Often
his
deepest perception amounts
to the seventh stanza of "Sunday Morning," a boisterous devotion to
the sun as a chant of the blood. Stevens is not what Gorham Munson
called him, a dandy; he is one of the more cogitative pagans of the
'twenties roving amid the sharper violences of the 'forties.
His
eupho–
ria has at moments diminished.
He has not attempted, like Eliot, to adopt fictions that seem to
bring larger clarifications than they actually do. "Sunday Morning,"
for example,
i'l
not doctrinaire or mannered. Stevens has understood
