BOOKS
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near the prophetic power of such a passage as this, from his first book:
You whom I gladly walk with, touch,
Or wait for as one certain of good,
We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
Death of the old ga'ng,· would leave them
In sullen valley where is made no fri end,
The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.
II
Transport to Summer
continues, extends, and enrichens the themes
which dominated Wallace Stevens' previous books. He is writing again
of the nature of poetry, of the way in which the imagination struggles
with reality, of the necessity and ultimate poverty of ideas face to face
with the darkness, variety, and endlessness of reality. To think of this
new book ·and of his work as a whole within the arena or circus tent
of modern literature is to come upon a fabulous image: Stevens is like
an inspired minister in a small church (the church, however, is within
the circus tent) who preaches sermons in celebration and in praise of
poetry, reality, and their various relations. His listeners are other poets,
but not all other poets. No one else appears to be interested enough to
attend, and if anyone else did, he would be perplexed by what Stevens
is saying and how he is saying it. For only poets remember that a good
book must be conquered like a foreign language, and he who runs can–
not read.
It
is true that there arc times when Stevens' tropes are too
tangential or peculiar to his own sensibility: he speaks once of "Marian–
na's Swedish cart," an allusion which can only be fully understood -if
one has read and remembered a recent poem by Marianne Moore. But
this example is extreme. R. P. Blackmur has remarked that Stevens'
poems "grow in the mind." At each new reading or new memory of
them, one comes upon an astonishing lucidity, while metaphors and
references which seem private or opaque become clear, necessary, fresh,
and original as a discovery or an invention. The texture of Stevens'
poetry is often visual, gay, and verbal in such a way that the reader
may easily miss the seriousness and the passion of the attitudes and the
emotions which are its substance. The starting point of so many poems
is so often poetry itself, poetry as such, that Stevens may often seem
