WALLACE STEVENS
87
that these supremacies cannot be re-established, at least in their old
autonomy. The speculative energy of his verse has served as a com–
mentary upon the disorganization of the poetic temperament in a
time destitute of fictions. Living in the "immense detritus of a world
/ that is completely waste," knowing that we have been offered
stone~,
not bread, in Monday's dirty light, he diagnoses himself as a man
whose pharynx is bad because the time is so indifferent; Marx, too,
l}as spoiled the landscape for him. Without being committed to dogma
or abstractions or the dialectics of a social program, he has betokened
the disabilities of the pure poetic fiction, which in ways has proved
a cul-de-sac narrower and drier than the letter of the law.
Stevens has been perilously near making a great refusal.
AB
he
has admitted, the contemporary -poet cannot evade the pressure of
the anti-poetic-the anti-poetic in the streets of Passaic and Ruther–
ford. We may allow
him
an ivory tower from which one gains "such
an exceptional view of the public dump and the advertising signs."
The questions are whether Stevens has not been too dimly aware of
this essential prose, and whether he considers Rutherford and Passaic
anti-poetic simply because of being Rutherford and Passaic, or be–
cause their violence is inexorable.
In spite of his profession that the imagination must adhere to
reality-that the subject matter of poetry is the life lived among the
solid static objects of space (a scene composed by the very living in it)
-precisely what we miss in Stevens is this composing an1idst objects
themselves. His view of the poetic imagination ultimately opposes
tO
the violence without a violence within, and identifies poetry with
counter-pressures. The violence of his pressure against "mournful"
objects imposes upon his experience ot them arbitrary and even too–
abstract constructions. The blue guitar does not right the balance
between actuality and imagination. .The composition too autocrati–
cally determines the form of the experience instead of serving as a
coherence within experience. These arbitrary constructions are of lim–
ited reference, often retinal and auditory. Stevens has said that "a poet's
words are of things that do not exist without the words." From this
Crocean view it does not necessarily follow, however, that "poetry is
words" or that "words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds."
Delmore Schwartz has remarked that Stevens takes an art-perspective.
His interests are compositions. He has consumed his talents in formu–
lating a poetical epistemology to define the categories by which the
anti-poetic (and the poetic) are to be apprehended. He has been the
connoisseur of
his
own responses to the chaos about him.
