Marius Bewley
THE POETRY OF WALLACE STEVENS
A good deal of criticism has been written by this time on
the poetry of Wallace Stevens; and it is poetry that requires extensive
analysis in the beginning if it is finally to be read with much intel–
ligence. But that criticism has not been consistently accurate or
helpful, and some of the best of it-an essay by the late Hi Simons
in
Sewanee Review,
for example- is now forgotten in the files of
literary periodicals. R. P. Blackmur's essay in
The Double Agent
is
still illuminating, and, fortunately, still available; but the only other
easily accessible extended essay is Yvor Winters' acrid attack, "Wallace
Stevens, or the Hedonist's Progress," which is extremely misleading
in its conclusions. And even these articles (Blackmur's and Winters')
were written early, and deal almost exclusively with
Harmonium.
The result of this critical situation is that there has been a persistent
bias in favor of Stevens' first volume, and this has led to an under–
estimation of the importance of meaning in his work as a whole. Yet
Stevens deserves his reputation partly because his meaning is an im–
portant one, and because that meaning has been consistently develop–
ing from
Harmonium
towards the maturity of the late work. I do not
wish to imply that the central meaning
in
Stevens' poetry is not pre–
sent in
Harmonium
just as much as in
Transport to Summer,
but
it
is present in a hidden way, and also in a less mature way, and it is
sc,.metimes extremely difficult to come by. Marianne Moore once
wrote: "Wallace Stevens: the interacting veins of life between his
early and late poems are an ever-continuing marvel to me." It is only
by tracing out some of these veins of interaction that one can ever
be
quite
sure, at least in the early poems, that one knows in fulness
of detail what Stevens is talking about.
The relation, then, of Stevens' late work to his early work is
not one of conflict or supersession. But neither would it be correct
