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PARTISAN REVIEW
If
at this point one opens Stevens' Princeton lecture, "The Noble
Rider and the Sound of Words," printed in Allen Tate's
The Lan–
guage of Poetry,
the following passage proves helpful in distinguishing
between the plights of Azcan and the Capitan. Stevens says there that
the possible poet of today "will consider that although he has him–
self witnessed, during the long period of his life, a general transition
to reality, his own measure as a poet, in spite of all the passions of
all the lovers of the truth, is the measure of his power to abstract
himself, and to withdraw with him, into his abstraction, the reality on
which the lovers of the truth insist. He must be able to abstract him–
self, and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his
imagination. He knows perfectly that he cannot be too noble ,a rider,
that he cannot rise up loftily in helmet and armor on a horse of im–
posing bronze." Now the Capitan is a successful exponent of the
imagination because he is able to dispense with the "formidable
helmet." He knows how to deal with reality, how to subjugate it
to himself by his abstracting genius. Azcan, on the other hand, is imag–
ination mounted on too high a horse; his henna hackles are too
impressive an armor, and he
is
out of touch with reality. "There are
degrees of imagination," Stevens had said in the same lecture, "as,
for example, degrees of vitality, and therefore of intensity. It is an
implication that there are degrees of reality." And he further re–
marked that poetry represents an "interdependence of the imagination
and reality as equals." But the hostile, military bearing of the inch–
ling towards Azcan signifies that reality, in the world of this poem,
is militantly out of sympathy with the imagination, and each is
thereby revealed as incomplete in itself because of that hostility.
Stevens wrote in
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
(reprinted in
Transport to Summer)
:
How clean the sun when seen in its idea,
Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven
That has expelled us and our images.
Because of the distorted dealings between them, Azcan cannot abstract
from reality towards that pure idea of the sun: the sun is only a
blackamoor to him, smeared over with the grimy limitations of physical
fact. And yet, although prevented from functioning properly, Azcan
remains a good giant at heart. When the inchling screams "Fat!" at
