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PARTI SAN REVIEW
to be merely the poet who is writing poetry about poetry. But it is as if
a man who started to dig a well dug so long and so deeply that he dug
his way to China. Stevens seeks out so many of the inexhaustible con–
nections of poetry that he unearths a great deal of the actual world.
Which is what one would expect: if you study anything closely enough,
you find yourself studying a great many other things, of necessity. As
Stevens says in one of his new poems, "Adam in Eden was the father of
Descartes." Or, as in the motion of many of his poems, poetry brings
one to the imagination which brings one to what is not imagined but
actual which brings one to wonder which is which or Descartes, and
whether Adam was as metaphysical and critical as Descartes, and in
the end the poet has written a new poem in which the actual world
becomes new again. For example:
MEN MADE OUT OF WORDS
What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?
Castratos of moon-mash-Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one,
By the terrible incantations of defeats.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
and for one more example, a more eloquent one:
The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea.
...
It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginning
And sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
To an immaculate e>nd. We move between these points
From that ever-early CM!dor to its late plural
And the candor of them is the strong exhilaration
Of what we feel from what we think, of thought
Beating in the heart, as if blood newly came,
An elixir, an excitation, a pure power.
The poem, through candor, brings back ·a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.
D ELJIIORE SCHWARTZ
