3~O
PARTISAN REVIEW
of a laudable category-for him it is always
the
generalization whose
life is derived, whose authority is delegated. Goethe said, quite as
if
he were talking about Stevens: "It makes a great difference whether
the poet seeks the particular in relation to the universal or contemplates
the universal in the particular . . . [In the first case] the particular
functions as an example, as an instance of the universal; but the
second indeed represents the very nature of poetry. He who grasps this
particular as living essence also encompasses the universal."
As a poet Stevens has every gift but the dramatic. It is the lack
of immediate contact with lives that hurts his poetry more than any–
thing else, that has made it easier and easier for him to abstract, to
philosophize, to treat the living dog that wags its tail and bites you as
the "canoid patch" of the epistemologist analyzing that great problem,
the world; as the "cylindrical arrangement of brown and white" of the
aesthetician analyzing that great painting, the world. Stevens knows
better, often for poems at a time:
At dawn,
The paratroopers fall and as they fall
They mow the lawn . A vessel sinks in waves
Of people, as big bell-billows from its bell
Bell-bellow in the village steeple. Violets,
Great tufts, spring up from buried houses
Of poor, dishonest people, for whom the steeple,
Long since, rang out farewell, farew ell, farewell.
This is a map with people living on it. Yet it is fatally easy for the
scale to become too small, the distance too great, and us poor, dishonest
people no more than data to be manipulated.
As one reads Stevens' later poetry one keeps thinking that he
needs to
be
possessed by subjects, to be shaken out of himself, to have
his subject individualize his poem; one remembers longingly how much
more individuation there was in
Harmonium-when
you're young you
try to be methodical and philosophical, but reality keeps breaking in.
The best of
Harmonium
exists at a level that it is hard to rise above;
and Stevens has had only faintly and intermittently the dramatic in–
sight, the capacity to
be
obsessed by lives, actions, subject-matter, the
chameleon's shameless interest in everything but itself, that could
have broken up the habit and order and general sobering matter-of-fact–
ness of age. Often, nowadays, he seems disastrously set in his own ways,
a fossil imprisoned in the rock of himself-the
best
marble but, still,
marble.
