WALLACE
STEVENS
913
with taking up the social burden, but there was a withdrawal in
Stevens' poetry from the predominance of the image, and Stevens
(perhaps partly because of the shock of the war, although the change
had begun earlier) began to feel increasingly in terms of an inquisitive
and flexible line-a line capable of making deeper explorations and
wider applications of his images to social reality than had been pos–
sible in many of his earlier saffron-starched verses.
Parts of a World
is unsuccessful (but this is said with a view only to explaining the
success of his later work) because the conspicuous metaphor is still
making a strong bid for controlling interest, but is steadily being
supplanted by a new rhythmical interest which follows more closely
the movements of the questioning and generous mind. And )tet neither
a balance nor an interesting tension is usually achieved in this volume
between the two elements. They behave towards each other with the
easy nonchalance of bar companions, and this is the more remark–
able in that some of the poems treat of the nature of poetry itself
with unusual insight. In
Transport to Summer
(although the dates
of the composition of the poems in these two volumes must have
overlapped) the balance is righted, and
Notes toward a Supreme
Fiction,
reprinted in this book, will possibly be Stevens' greatest
achievement, and it should be one of the great adornments of Amer–
ican literature-a set of thirty meditations on the nature of the imagi–
nation.
Finally, we have another of Stevens' best poems,
A Primitive like
an Orb.
In this poem the transition he has been making from an
imagistically to a rhythmically controlled consciousness (this in itself
implies something that might be mistaken for a social consciousness)
is triumphantly completed; but not, it is interesting to note, without
the assistance of Eliot's late poetry, which, without being derivative,
it yet somehow resembles. It might be repetitious here to discuss
this poem at any length, but I cannot drop the matter without com–
menting on the singular propriety of the title. We have seen how
the adjective "primitive," as a term of general application, signifies
the triumph of the imagination in the world of Stevens' meaning.
As
a work of
art,
"primitive" carries the same meaning, but focussed
more insistently on the imagination's goal of operation. In this sense
its opposition to the academic and conventional is almost rhetorical.
But since the "Primitive" of the title aims at achieving an imaginative
