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PARTISAN REVIEW
and disinterestedness, the thoughtful truthfulness of the best sections of
a poem like
Esthetique du Mal,
one is grateful for, overawed by, this
poetry that knows so well the size and age of the world; that reminds
us, as we sit in chairs procured from the furniture exhibitions of the
Museum of Modern Art, of that immemorial order or disorder upon
which our present scheme of things is a monomolecular film; that coun–
sels us-as Santayana wrote of Spinoza-CCto say to those little gnostics, to
those circumnavigators of being:
I do not believe you; God is great."
Many of the poems look grayly out at "the immense detritus of a
world/ That is completely waste, that moves from waste/ To waste,
out of the hopeless waste of the past/ Into a hopeful waste to come";
but more of the poems see the unspoilable delights, the inexhaustible
interests of existence--when you have finished reading Stevens' best
poems you remember once more that man is not only the jest and riddle
of the world, but the glory.
Some of my readers may feel about all this, "But how can you
reconcile what you say with the fact that
Auroras of Autumn
is not a
good book? Shouldn't the fully mature Stevens be producing late
masterpieces even better than the early ones?" (A similar question con–
cerns
The Cocktail Party.)
All such questions show how necessary it
is to think of the poet as somebody who has prepared himself to be
visited by a daemon, as a sort of accident-prone worker to whom poems
happen-for otherwise we
expect
him to go on writing good poems,
better poems, and this is the one thing you cannot expect even of
good poets, much less of anybody else. Good painters in their seventies
may produce good pictures as regularly as an orchard produces apples;
but Planck is a great scientist because he made one discovery as a young
man-and I can remember reading in a mathematician's memoirs a
sentence composedly recognizing the fact that, since the writer was now
past forty, he was unlikely ever again to do any important creative work
in mathematics. A man who is a good poet at forty
may
turn out to
be a good poet at sixty; but he is more likely to have stopped writing
poems, to be doing exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted
to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good
poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunder–
storms, to
be
struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two
dozen times and he is great.
