REFLECTIONS ON WALLACE STEVENS
the beauty
Of the moonlight'
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the innocent air-
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this, at last, is lost in rhetoric, in elaboration and artifice and con–
trivance, in an absolutely ecumenical Method of seeing and thinking
and expressing, in
Craftsmanship:
why has no loving soul ever given
Stevens a copy of that
Principles of Art
in which Collingwood argues
at length-many people might say pmves-that art is not a craft at
all? (1 hardly dare to quote one great poet's even more sweeping
"But 1 deny that poetry is an art.") In
Auroras of Autumn
one sees
almost everything through a shining fog, a habitualness not just of
~
style but of machinery, perception, anything: the green spectacles show
us a world of green spectacles; and the reader, staring out into this Eden,
thinks timidly: "But it's all so
monotonous."
When Marx said that he
wasn't a Marxist he meant, I suppose, that he himself was not one of
his own followers, could not be taken in by the prolongation and simpli–
fication of his own beliefs that a disciple would make and believe; and
there is nothing a successful artist needs to pray so much as: "Lord,
don't let me keep on believing
only this,'
let me have the courage of
something beside my own convictions; let me escape at last from the
maze of myself, from the hardening quicksilver womb of my own char–
acteristicalness."
I have felt as free as posterity to talk in this way of Stevens'
weaknesses, of this later mold in which he has cast himself, since he
seems to me-and seems to my readers, 1 am sure--one of the great
poets of our century, someone whom the world will keep on reading just
as it keeps on listening to Vivaldi or Scarlatti, looking at Tiepolo or
Poussin. His best poems are the poetry of a man fully human--of some–
one sympathetic, magnanimous, both brightly and deeply intelligent;
the poems see, feel, and think with equal success; they treat with
mastery that part of existence which allows of mastery, and experience
the rest of it with awe or sadness or delight. Minds of this quality of
genius, of this breadth and delicacy of understanding, are a link be–
tween us and the past, since they are, for us, the past made living;
and they are our surest link with the future, since they are the part of
us which the future will know. As one feels the elevation and sweep
