912
PARTISAN REVIEW
in
the expression of his meaning in his early volumes that a group
of miscellaneous poems, all intent on saying, willy-nilly, pretty much
the same thing in a wide (but related) variety of metaphors could
add nothing to his achievement, and I frequently find the monoto–
nous shadow of these poems falling over the real quality of his late
work, and marring the purity of response. "A Dish of Peaches in
Russia," for example, seems regrettable to me:
The peaches are large and roun,d,
Ah! and red; and they have peach fUZZ, ah!
They are full of juice and the skin is soft.
They are full of the colours of my village
And of fair weather, summer, dew, peace.
I did not know
That such ferocities could tear
One self from another, as these peaches do.
No doubt peaches can strike off imaginative feats in the proper
observer, but that "and they have peach fuzz, ah!" leaves me un–
easy. It doesn't seem to be leading up to the "ferocities" in the last
verse. But Stevens' subject-matter cannot be condemned because
it happens, in this poem, to have failed disastrously. A good artist is
entitled to his failures (if only he wouldn't publish them), and the
failure here is not one of theory but one of practice. Imagination as
subject-matter (implicit here, of course) is bound to look a little
mauve and decadent
if,
in a given instance, it is unable to strain
beyond Fancy.
I have made a point of this poem because it seems suggestive in
several ways about Stevens' development as a poet. The enamelled
images of
Harmonium
had carried certain limitations of expression
with them, but they were sometimes of great beauty and peculiar
subtlety.
If
in the late 'thirties Stevens did not actually, as some
competent critics imagined, acquire a social consciousness, there does
appear to have been a shift in his mode of experiencing- a gradual
change in his verse rhythms. What was happening had nothing to do
