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PARTISAN REVIEW
problem of the Many and the One, which was the great passion of
the Metaphysicals: and perhaps no contemporary poet has more as–
sociations (however tenuous and qualified) with the earlier seven–
teenth century than Stevens. But a comparison would hardly be fair
to him, for it would tend to show how much better off they were
than we, both in the concrete immediacy of their language and in
the controlled precision of their abstractions.
"Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame," Stevens had written
in the opening line of "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," that
poem in
Harmonium
which had shocked Mr. Winters so much. And
with that utterance, Stevens had proceeded to attempt a reconcilia–
tion of the conventionally irreconcilable. The poem is not much more
than an effective piece of rhetoric, and the fusion fails to occur imagi–
natively, but the intention is clear. Stevens says that the High-Toned
Old Christian Woman is aiming at very much the same sort of thing–
perhaps less effectually-as the low-toned artists of whom she would
hardly approve. Mr. Winters says of this: "we learn that the 'moral
law' is not necessary as a framework of art, but that the 'opposing
law' will do just as well.... " Read this poem as I may, I cannot dis–
cover any more sinister meaning in it than that High-Toned (surely
that adjective is suggestive of the sort of Brahminism Stevens had
in mind ) Old Christian Women do not hold a monopoly of spiritual
experiences. Both the perspectives of the Old Christian Woman and
the "disaffected flagellants" open at last into similar palm-treeds vistas,
for "fictive things wink as they will." In other words, the shaping
spirit of imagination is transcendant.
To hold oneself a little longer to the progress of Mr. Winters'
analysis of Stevens- the critic proceeds from a consideration of "A
High-Toned Old Christian Woman" to one of the most rhythmically
sensitive among Stevens' earlier poems, or for that matter, in the
entire body of his work. The poem is somewhat inconsequently called,
"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad." Mr. Winters quite rightly re–
prints the original version of the poem as
it
appeared in its periodical
publication rather than the seriously mutilated version in
Harmonium,
in which its beauty is ruinously damaged. Of this poem Mr. Winters
has to say: "The poet has progressed in this poem to the point at
which the intensity of emotion possible in actual human life has be–
come insipid, and he conceives the possibility of ultimate satisfac-
