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PARTISAN REVIEW
to say that the late work relates to the early as the sum of a problem
relates to the digits it totals, for something has been added in the late
work that was not present, in however piecemeal a state, before.
What this addition is may be only a complex balance, an infusion
of remarkable poise, but it
is
new. And despite those critics who think
Harmonium
the best of the volumes, it was needed. Its presence may
have contributed to that sense of change in Stevens' work that led
some critics in the late 'thirties to think he had taken up the social
burden; but actually what was being taken up were the familiar
meanings of the early verse, but taken up in a new way by the
imagination-taken up, in fact, into what was sometimes a new
dimension of poetic reality (new, at any rate for Stevens), and oc–
casionally one could turn aside and look downward from the new
use to the old use of an identical image, and realize with a sense of
delicious discovery that one now, perhaps, really read the earlier
poem for the first time. Stevens' poetry shares this ability to be read
profitably both forward and backward with Eliot's poetry. When the
"Preludes" were first printed in
Bldst
in 1915 they must have seemed
little more than remarkable Imagist poems, yet Eliot had showed
almost uncanny prevision in naming them, and returning now from
the
Quartets
to those early opening themes, their images acquire,
through the resonance of all the later work, a depth and meaning that
was surely not present to their earliest readers.
In a somewhat similar manner Wallace Stevens can write in "Six
Significant Landscapes" (
Harmonium)
what appears, what un–
doubtedly is, a charming little Imagist piece hardly beyond Amy
Lowell's prowess:
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking
at
the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses-
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon–
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
