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PARTISAN REVIEW
low, has been held to obstinately enough to deserve the honorary title
of "a philosophy of life." It is the philosophy, say, of the adolescent who
wants the moon down out of the sky, but wants it to stay up there and
shine on him, too. But far deeper even than this there is the fact that
Mr. Cummings's comparative undevelopment as a civilized human be–
ing does not, any more than the wrong-headed, peevish, or illogical re–
marks he makes prevent one from feeling that in some way he is in
close direct touch-in a way that the rest of us, the denizens of the
"unreal city" are not-with a source and justification of being. His
silliness in a sense is locally traditional, it is in the line of Thoreau's
silliness or Emerson's, and carries with it its counterbalance of raw in–
sight. In an orthodox age, like the early seventeenth century, the in–
sight would have been chastened and civilized by a social background;
it has had to fight grimly to maintain its right to existence against a
social background that seemed to make nonsense of it. That accounts
for the stridencies. But a tough, temperamental consistency holds Mr.
Cummings's book together; and lust, disgust, high-jinks, and despair do
not manage to crowd out the impression that love and joy, precariously
defended, are what this poet understands most profoundly.
There are no stridencies in Mr. Stevens. And to the question about
what is the central thing lacking the answer might be, in his case, just
that "matter of life" which is there, for all his faults, in the work of
Mr. Cummings. And, indeed, again, the crude and obvious thing to say
about Mr. Stevens-yet like many crude and obvious things, the cen–
trally just one-is that, not having wanted to cope with that "matter
of life," he has tried to substitute for it a "matter of mind." His poems,
to continue on this crude level, are about perception and reflection on
perception. They are about what the mind can make of experience, not
about experience as raw. They become more and more not only reflec–
tive but self-reflective, poems about what the poem is, poems in which
the poet asks himself what he is doing, and in answering is still writing
the same poem, and so indefinitely can or indeed has to extend his an–
swer. Thus, many of Mr. Stevens's later poems are like commentaries
on themselves that could be added to forever, section by section, like ex–
panding bookcases. Something of a similar sort is true of earlier and
shorter poems; there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, but
there might be fifteen, or twenty, or any number. What the mind picks
out from perceptual experience is always one of many possible aspects,
and one of many possible ways of presenting that aspect, and about
the choosing of the aspect, and the choosing of the mode, there must
