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PARTISAN REVIEW
if
Stevens, Azcan, the Capitan, and the Arabian are all tea guests at
the Palaz of Hoon, there is no reason to suppose that Eliot with the
third walking by his side is not also on friendly calling terms with
that tremendous Personage. Only the inchling must go without his
tea.
So we conclude that however much Azcan seems to fail the func–
tion he ought to be performing, the blame lies with the truculent
inchling, who is a most uncooperative reality. And one should note
that he turns away from insulting Azcan to point the Appalachian
tangs of the pines, thereby bringing the good wildness of nature under
control in the same way that the grey and bare jar on the Tennessee
hill domesticated the wilderness. His "Begone!" is, in a sense, self–
defensive, for he instinctively knows that the kind of relationship
described in one of Stevens' most beautiful poems will never bind
him
to Azcan. This poem (the dedication of
Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction)
describes the escape from moral isolation through the imagi–
nation:
And for what, except for you, do I feel love?
Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man
Close to me, hidden in me day and night?
In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,
Equal in living changingness to the light
In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest,
For a moment in the central of our being,
The vivid transparence that you bring is peace.
To achieve a very deep understanding of "Bantams
in
Pine–
Woods" it must be read with some such wide range of reference to
the other poems as has been indicated here. I say "some" because the
references might easily have been to other poems than the ones actually
selected in this paper. But this raises an extremely difficult problem
of evaluation. By the time one has arrived at such a reading, it seems
doubtful if one is really looking at the original poem any longer, or
responding to it as it objectively exists. I said earlier that there is a
sense in which a poet rewrites
his
collected works every time he writes
a genuinely new poem, but there is also a sense in which both the
poet and the interpreting critic can abuse the privileges implicit in
this statement. I had chiefly in mind the increasing density of mean-
