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PARTISAN REVIEW
both as an executive of an insurance company and as a poet, that
caught and held the admiration of young men and women who wrote
verse. It was rumored that he was rich, very rich, rich enough to escape
all minor economic misfortlmes and turns of chance. In the United
States there has never been any sustained disrespect for wealth; rough–
ness and the "homespun" manner are often enjoyed, but always with
the hope of finding "a rough diamond" or "a heart of gold." So far
as the best of Stevens' verse revealed him, he was a pluralist and a
skeptic; and certain external features of his legend had become attractive
to emulate. The new
Zeitgeist
quickly absorbed whatever it understood
of this legend; then it acquired an air of "difference" from the forty
years that separated it from the first publication of
Harmonium.
It
disregarded conscious bohemianism and "sexual freedom," as well as
the Left Wing politics of the 1930's, and the "academic" irony fashion–
able in the 1940's that was best represented by the little magazine
Furioso.
The conventions of the new
Zeitgeist
were being formed. The more
"advanced" younger poets had become instructors and lecturers and
behind academic fa<;ades embittered laurels were being watered and
cultivated; old-fashioned excess (if any) and toasts drunk to the
memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald were reserved for holidays, or discreetly
converted into weekend faculty cocktail parties. These younger poets
began to use the word "elegance" in praising each other's writings, and
if twenty years ago it had become fashionable to be "proletarian" in
spirit, in the early 1950's, it had become a virtue to say that one could
not live on less than ten thousand a year, that if one did not have
hidden sources of wealth, it was a disgrace to live at all. Stevens'
"elegance" was of mind and temperament, yet it was one that seemed
easy to imitate in terms of the more garish advertising pages of
Harper's Bazaar, Vogue
and
The New Yorker,
the kind of literature
that for a brief, wholly deceptive moment makes the reader feel like a
luxury product himself, ready to join the "International Set," to be
severe with middle-aged, wealthy American patronesses in Rome, and
to drink at Harry's Bar in Venice. The word "elegance," like so many
transitory usages of language in the United States, has become the
choice of copywriters to sell everything the suburban matron wears. One
might suspect collusion between the poets of
Harper's Bazaar
and the
shopkeepers of Westchester.
One effect of the suburban influence has been to revive a kind
of writing that had been forgotten since 1914. What used to be called
"magazine verse" forty years ago is back in print again, decorously
