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PARTISAN REVIEW
unity in diversity, at seeing the wholeness behind each fragment of
experience, it is a primitive shaped like an orb. And the "orb" is
nothing less than the age-old circle of perfection which can be symbol–
ized even in a little drop of dew, of which Marvell wrote:
. the clear Region where 'twas' born
Round in itself encloses:
And in its little Globes extent
Frames as it can its native Element.
III
Harmonium,
good as it is, has been praised excessively at
the expense of the late work, and the late work has a habit of being
confused with "transition" work; but in spite of all such confusions
Stevens is almost certainly (after the two exceptions earlier noted)
the most considerable figure that American poetry has produced in
this century. His meaning, insofar as it is operative within the fabric
of his verse, has none of the immaturity that Winters accused it of,
and it is large and coherent enough to form the basis of an important
body of expression. Furthermore, its meaning is traditional, and it
relates,
in
a way unusual in American art, to a European past. I do
not mean that Stevens' poetry is a sycophant of Europe, but only
that the tradition in which he thinks and feels and writes is not a
provincial backwater. It is part of the main current, and one does
not feel strange in speaking of him in relation to the great traditional
non-American poets. He is validly related.
And he has a particular significance for our time. He has been
immediately and painfully aware of the cultural disintegration that
has closed in with such vehemence since the end of World War
I.
Perhaps in as intense a way as Yeats (the subject-matter of his poetry
has been even more directly concerned) he has known that "the
centre does not hold," and his Princeton lecture contains one or two
of the most anguished passages dealing with our cultural tragedy
that come to mind. It is in relation to his sense of the catastrophic
fragmentariness of the contemporary world that his belief in the unify–
ing power of the imagination has achieved such rare distinction. It
cannot, in the nature of the case, offer a solution theoretically as
