342
PARTISAN REVIEW
who hardly tries to subordinate his Method to the requirements of any
particular situation or material. The individual poems are less and less
differentiated; the process is always more evident than what is being
processed; everything is so familiarly contrived by will and habit and
rule of thumb (for improvisation, as Virgil Thompson says, "among
all the compositional techniques is the one most servile to rules of
thumb") that it does not seem to matter exactly which being is under–
going these immemorial metamorphoses. Stevens' passagework, often,
is so usual that we can't believe past the form to the matter: what truth
could survive these pastry-cook's, spun-sugar, parallel qualifications?
It was like sudden time in a world without time,
This world, this place, the street in which I was,
Without time: as that which is not has ,not time,
Is not, or is of what there was, is full .
...
And on the shelf below:
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that reached
In a place that he reached.
...
It is G. E. Moore at the spinet. And it looks worst of all when one
compares it with a passage from that classic of our prose, that gen–
eralizer from an Age of Reason, that hapless victim of Poetic Diction,
that-but let me quote:
As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spite,
So these their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their Honor died.
See how the World its Veterans rewards!
A Youth of Frolics, an old Age of Cards;
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without Lovers, old without a Friend;
A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot;
Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot!
The immediacy and precision and particularity, the live touch of
things, the beauty that exists in precarious perfection in so many
poems
in
Harmonium-
