WALLACE STEVENS
907
The group of poems called
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,
which,
after Pound, (and counting Eliot in the English tradition), may
easily be the most distinguished work written by an American poet
in this century, is not particularly difficult to understand, nor, for
that matter, is his most recent poem,
A Primitive like an Orb.
If
the meaning in Stevens' poetry is again submitted to some scrutiny
here, it is certainly not in the belief that anything surprisingly new
can be said; but the substance of Stevens' poetry can be discussed
in terms that incorporate it more firmly in a traditional context, and
I think that is important: for Stevens' poetry has been too much dis–
cussed in terms of relativism, misology, Hedonism-even Bergsonian–
ism.
If
several of these terms can be justified-and of course they
can-the result is nevertheless that of dislodging Stevens' poetry from
the tradition in which it seems to me most richly assimilable.
There is one difficulty to be guarded against especially in any
discussion of meaning in Stevens' verse. Such a discussion is likely to
get as far away from any consideration of the poetry itself as a dis–
cussion of Milton's theology can carry one away from
Paradise Lost.
The present brief examination hardly affords an opportunity for de–
tailed discussion of the poetry, but I wish to examine two early poems
with a view to seeing (at least in the second example) how much
of Stevens' meaning is actually realized in terms of the verse. Beyond
that concrete realization of his meaning in the body of the poetry,
the further rational perspectives that may be drawn from it ought not
to interest the literary critic, at least
as
critic. They are not his prov–
ince.
It
will be seen, I think, that the part of Stevens' meaning which
is poetically significant declares him to be an exponent of Coleridge'S
theory of the imagination; and in terms of this tradition rather than in
any "modern" vocabulary one may be able to read his poetry with
a new intimacy. I doubt if Stevens and Coleridge would have been
much alike in any other way, but they seem to meet perfectly in,
say, the final paragraphs of the chapter "On the Imagination," in
Biographia Literaria,
or, perhaps especially, in the conclusion of the
following chapter, "Philosophic Definitions." And the Coleridgean
imagination has become the theme of Stevens' poetry as a whole in a
way it never became the theme of Coleridge's poetry as a whole. His
theme is the reconciliation of opposites by intuitive vision, the dis–
covery of unity in diversity-and in that phrase we move back to the
