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PARTISAN REVIEW
curiously, if modestly, resembles. Although the emotion of direct
sensuous experience has ceased to move the poet, a new and deeper
emotion arises from knowledge of his incapacity to respond in the
old key. The kind of satisfaction that Stevens is looking for in the
second half of the poem hardly seems as degraded as Mr. Winters
thinks. The desire is to go behind the fragmentary and transitory in
experience and grasp its essentiality, no longer perceived in a con–
text in which the elements are vulgarized ("The grand ideas of the
villages"), and constantly being lost again through the fitfulness of
forms and faculties at the very moment of apprehension. The desire is
for the "vivid transparence" of peace- and if that peace would ex–
clude some of the things that the High-Toned Old Christian Woman
stood for, I do not believe that Stevens meant her as an adequate
symbol for the best that has been said and thought in the Christian
world. What the ultimate nature (in rigorous philosophical lan–
guage) of the reality sought in such an absolute winter and perpetual
summer would be is none of the critics' business. For the purposes
of the poetry it plainly involves, like the earlier poem, a reconciliation
of opposites towards comprehending the largest possible degree of
reality, and in so doing it would conform to Coleridge'S theory of the
imagination-a creative willing together into a new and unified reality
of hitherto separable quantities. It is the temporary cessation of this
imaginative power that Stevens is talking about in this poem, just
as Coleridge was lamenting its loss in his greatest
poem-The Dejec–
tion Ode.
The imagery in this poem relates as closely to the later work as
the poems previously considered here. But it is also perfectly self-con–
tained, while its deeply personal rhythm offers a kind of satisfaction
that cannot be derived from the rhetorical cadences of, say, "The
Comedian as the Letter C.") Mr. Blackmur at one point in his treat–
ment of Stevens' rhetoric invoked the name of Marlowe. Taking up
his suggestive remark, I should say that this poem of Stevens com–
pares to much of the remainder of
Harmonium
(particularl¥ "The
Comedian as the Letter C") as the best passages in
Dr
.
Faustus
compare to
Tamburlaine .
But although "The Man Whose Pharynx
Was Bad" is sufficient to itself, it is interesting to examine, in rela–
tion to it, these lines from the poem, "That Which Cannot Be Fixed"
(Transport to Summer)
:
