902
PARTISAN REVIEW
And still the grossest irridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.
Life's nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
Stevens always uses "primitive" to indicate the natural sources
of vitality and insight which are suppressed by the academic and the
insistently rational; and the stars and ocean (it is interesting to note
that the ocean's "irridescence" is "gross," a synonym for "fat") are
merely two items from his usual landscape that serve the same func–
tion. The Arabian, then, is seen, like Azcan and the Capitan, to be
the symbol of imaginative knowl€dge; but it is necessary to remem–
ber that these three are not identical for they exist under different
circumstances. (Incidentally, it is rather amusing to note the diverse
implications carried by Stevens' Arabian astrologist and Eliot's
Madame Sosostris, whose name, oddly enough- to say nothing of dear
Mrs. Equitone-might have been invented by Stevens. )
It
was not
difficult to pass Azcan's hoos off as utter nonsense the first time one
heard them, but now
it
is clear that Azcan and the Arabian both
learned their hoos from nature itself, from the wood-dove and the
ocean. And in another early poem, the frequently ,anthologized "Tea
at the Palaz of Hoon," that exalted Personage with whom the purple–
gowned and fragrant tea guest (the state of guesthood, it should be
said, is not explicit in the poem, but the hospitable social implications
of the title are inescapable, and are directly related to Stevens' concep–
tion of the relation between imagination and society*) found himself
more "truly and more strange," and proceeded to create an imagina–
tive synthesis of the world, may very well be merely the personifica–
tion of Azcan's wild woodnote, which the inchling with his preference
for hard facts scorns so much.
In proclaiming himself to be "the personal," the inchling has
merely mistaken the part for the whole, for it is clear that a true
"personal" could not tolerate a dichotomy between the sensuous ex–
perience of external reality and imaginative knowledge any more
tohan the person could be defined in terms of a single faculty. But
the "scientific" bias of the inchling with his insolent cry to the im–
aginative life, "Begone!" reveals him content with fragmentary exist-
*
Stevens has written: " .. . reality is life, and life is society and the imagina–
tion and reality, that is to say, the imagination and society are inseparable."
