WALLACE STEVENS
89
The poet
is
a virile youth whose ecstasy suffices for his fictions–
unless there come somber figurations of social unrest, the pain of war,
the essential prose.
Amid the violences of
his
mature desires the poet,
in
his "radiant
and productive atmosphere," surrenders to the "morality of the right
sensation." The green fish in the reeds will be his absolute; the supreme
fictions will be revealed within experience, which itself is epiphany–
"ecstatic identities between one's self and the weather."
This adequacy of landscape is an organic sensibility. By the
"heart's residuum" the war between mind and sky is suspended, for
desire springs up within the object, and the concept within the ex–
perience of desire and the object. There are thirteen ways of looking
at a blackbird. There are "so many selves, so many sensuous worlds,"
as
in
_the private worlds of Bertrand Russell's realism. The identity
of the conceptual with the experiential recalls Wordsworth's repudia–
tion of reason as a false secondary power of multiplying distinctions:
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is flwent in even t'he wintriest bronze.
Transcendentalism is, however, involved in the Wordsworthian
situation. By the immediacy of the sense sublime, Wordsworth trans–
cended his organic sensibilities and attained his supreme fiction. Ste–
vens has of late known such moments-when "time flashed again" and
by an immaculate ecstasy he shared the first idea. Ordinarily he is so
hotly pursued by lions
in
Sweden that he cannot evade the meta–
physical question and accept "to be without a description of to be":
the supreme fiction must not only change and give pleasure, but must
be abstract as well. He must impose an order:
...
But to impose is not
To discover
...
to find,
Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all
...
. . .
To find the real,
To be stripped of every fiction except one,
The fiction of an absolute.
·
The composition of things no longer reads legibly- the myths of rose
and ice are done; and Stevens is left to repine for absolutes and to be
tormented with a sense that the very
...
thought of her takes her away.
The form of her in something else
Is not enough
...
•
