88
PARTISAN REVIEW
IV
Stevens has never determined whether the poem generates in
situation or myth; whether the imagination really ought to triumph
in the urgent "endless struggle with fact." To conclude, as he does,
that nothing will resolve the dilemma "except a consciousness of fact
as every0ne
is
at least satisfied to have it be,"
is
to conclude nothing, ·
for the myth that brings such· consciousness
is
wanting. Stevens is
repelled by, and intoxicated with, the object:
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To finrf.: the scene was
~et;
it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else . Its past was a souvenir
.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
This instant penetration of process to the degree of identification of
mind with object is not always possible, however, since our fictions
perversely contend with objects; there are lions in Sweden: after
majestic images of the soul-Fides, galled Justitia, Patientia- have
become souvenirs in our leafless wintry day
-
...
the whole of the soul, Swenson,
As every man in Sweden will concede,
Still hankers after lions, or, to shift,
Still hankers after sovereign images.
By reason of the souvenir, the nostalgia for myth, Stevens is a
pseudo-hedonist, a savage troubled. His impulse to surrender to the
object is cultivated with a violence prepense. The result is a falsetto
optimism:
The
...
plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind
with a resonance that seems a little contrived. Throughout we miss
the melancholy of Eliot and find instead Stevens the misologist striv–
ing to think "without the labor of thought," to sustain "a gaiety that
is being":
...
all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.
