PARTISAN REVIEW
Wallace Stevens:
These answers are limited to parts of questions 4, 6 and 7
and to poetry.
Experiment in language.
Poetry is nothing if it is not experiment
in language. A recent remark by de Rougemont,
"Le vrai superstitieux se moque des superstitions comme le vrai
poete des sujets et des mots poetiques,"
explains this. The poet records his experience as poet
in
subjects
and words which are part of that experience. He knows that nothing
but the truth of that experience means anything to him or to any–
one else. Experiment in respect to subjects and words is the effort
on his part to record the truth of that experience.
In this statement the experience
is
central and experiment
is
the
struggle with the experience and here experiment, also,
is
central. But
often there
is
little, even no, experience and here experiment
is
merely
experiment. The opinion that, unlike the twenties, this
is
not a period
of experiment seems to be right in respect to experience in both
senses. In respect to central experiment, the experience of the poet
as poet may be too much or too little for
him
to record as yet: too
much and too immediate or too little and not near enough; and
so it may never be recorded at all. In respect .to experiment that
is merely experiment, this seems, in the circumstances, to be a pastime
proper for Nero's children's children.
If
these things are fluctuations of literary modes, what
is
the
cause of the fluctuations? It may be simply our experience of life. To
sum this up, central experiment
is
one of the constants of the spirit
which is inherent in a true record of experience. But experiment
for the sake of experiment has no such significance. Our present ex–
perience of life
is
too violent
to
be
congenial to experiment in either
sense. There
is
also the consideration that the present time succeeds
a time of experiment. Theoretically a period of attempts at a world
revolution should destroy or endanger all stationary poetic subjects
and words and be favorable in the highest degree to the recording
of fresh experience. But the vivification of reality has not yet occurred
in spite of the excitement. Only the excitement has occurred.
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