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always be something arbitrary. The whole tone of polite irony, of urbane
mystification that pervades Mr. Stevens's work stems, I think, from this
central predicament of the reflective aesthete who, philosophically, is a
kind of pragmatic solipsist. The world, for Mr. Stevens, that the poet
lives in is the world that he chooses to shape by the arbitrary emphases
of a detached attention-an attention not itself shaped by the compul–
sions, for instance, of hunger or love. We feel continually, in reading
Mr. Stevens, that his actual
gifts
are comparable with those of the very
greatest poets (we do not feel this, about Mr. Cummings, when reading
him). Probably no modern poet has a more supple, rich, commanding,
and evocative vocabulary; within certain limits- Mr. Stevens would be
incapable of achieving the changes of pace, and the suddenings, slacken–
ings and concentrations, of "The Waste Land" or "Ash Wednesday"–
few modern poets are more notable masters of rhythm; very few con–
temporary poets, again, combine as Mr. Stevens does the three appar–
ently disparate gifts of evoking impressions with imagistic vividness,
shaping long poems with musical care, and pursuing through a long poem
a single, very abstruse, metaphysical argument. Yet in one's heart one
does not quite think that he is a "great" poet in the sense that, say,
Yeats and Eliot are "great" poets. What is it that one misses? Partly,
or perhaps mainly, the whole area of life that lies between detached
aesthetic perception and philosophical reflection on it; and, as a chief
corollary to that, the urgency of ordinary human passion, the sense of
commitment and the moment of final concentration. In one crude hu–
man sense, Mr. Stevens's enormous talents are being exploited a little
frivolously; in all one's continuing pleasure and admiration, while read–
ing him, there is the sense all the time of a lack of the highest tension.
It would be impertinent to illustrate the merits of such a distinguished
and famous writer by quotation; but here and there Mr. Stevens does
seem to me to show an awareness of this lack, in his work, of human
grasp, of human contact:
I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.
I sing a hero's head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,
Although, I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man,
If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,
