REFLECTIONS ON WALLACE STEVENS
339
seen as the creation of God, but as the Nature out of which we evolve;
man without myth, without God, without anything but the universe
which has produced him, is given an extraordinarily pure and touching
grandeur in these lines-lines as beautiful, I think, as any in American
poetry. Yet Stevens himself nearly equals them in two or three parts of
Esthetique du Mal,
the best of his later poems; there are in
Harmonium
eight or ten of the most beautiful poems an American has written; and a
book like
Parts of a World
is delightful as a whole, even though it
contains no single poem that can compare with the best in
Harmonium.
But
Auroras of Autumn,
Stevens' last book,1 is a rather different affair.
One sees in it the distinction, intelligence, and easy virtuosity of a master
-but it would take more than these to bring to life so abstract, so mo–
notonous, so overwhelmingly
characteristic
a book. Poems like these are,
always, the product of a long process of evolution; in Stevens' case the
process has been particularly interesting.
The habit of philosophizing in poetry--or of seeming to philosophize,
of using a philosophical tone, images, constructions, of having quasi–
philosophical daydreams-has been unfortunate for Stevens. Poetry is
a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has
to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand
that we should make of philosophy (that it
be
interesting) is the first
we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and
methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying
tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano. (One thinks of
Richard Wilbur's graceful "Tom Swift has vanished too,/ Who worked
at none but wit's expense,! Putting dirigibles together,/ Out in the yard,
in the quiet weather,/ Whistling behind Tom Sawyer's fence.") When
the first thing that Stevens can find to say of the Supreme Fiction is
that "it must be
abstract,"
the reader protests, "Why, even Hegel called
it a
concrete
universal"; the poet's medium, words, is abstract to begin
with, and it is only his unique organization of the words that forces the
poem, generalizations and all, over into the concreteness and singularity
that it exists for. But Stevens has the weakness-a terrible one for a
poet, a steadily increasing one in Stevens--of thinking of particulars as
primarily illustrations of general truths, or else as aesthetic, abstracted
objects, simply there to be contemplated; he often treats things or lives
so that they seem no more than generalizations of an unprecedentedly
low order. But surely a poet
has
to treat the concrete as primary, as
something far more than an instance, a hue to be sensed, a member
1.
Auroras of Autumn.
Knopf.
$3.00.
