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PARTISAN REVIEW
almost fifty years-the years, by the way, during which Stevens
elaborated his own poetic concepts and matured his unique style.
Stevens's first book,
Harmonium,
was published in 1923, when he
was already in his forties, and it has been alleged that this book ap–
peared because of the insistence of his friends. Though the creator
of a rare and subtle kind of verse, belonging to the modern tradition
of "difficult" poetry, Stevens, for years, made almost no effort to
propagandize for such poetry or to educate people to a better appre–
ciation of it. Apparently he did not regard himself as essentially a
man of letters. But did he think of himself as first of all a man of
affairs? In any case he was often bored with business, with the
practical adventures of money-making, the language of lawsuits and
insurance cases. He would go off on a vacation to Florida, to the
Carolinas, to Havana. It seems he always liked to live well. Drawn
toward new, more exotic and colorful places, he would feel the need
to speak a more pleasurable and attractive language. He would
write poems. And these poems were hardly ever intended as esthetic
commodities, produced to satisfy the demand of any specific audi–
ence; no more were they directed toward the public in general.
They seem to have sprung from a personal need for consummation,
being part of Wallace Stevens's good time.
This image I believe to be, in the main, accurate. However, my
reason for accepting this picture of the poet is fundamentally
his
poetry itself.
In his fine essay,
Examples of Wallace Stevens,
Richard Black–
mur writes: "The most striking,
if
not the most important thing
about Mr. Stevens's verse is its vocabulary." Herein we find a pro–
fusion of words that are not part of customary usage; many words
that are archaic, and many foreign words-from French, Italian,
Latin, Spanish-which under Stevens's auspices make their first
appearance into English poetry. Blackmur has selected such highly
typical words, and I can do no better than cite the very words he
chose to list, since I want to disagree with his judgment .as to the
reason for their presence. They are:
fubbed, girandoles, curlicues,
catarrhs, gobbet, diap·hanes, clopping, miniscule, pipping, pannicles,
carked, ructive, rapey, cantilene, buffo, fiscs, phylactery, princox
and
funest.
"Not a word listed above
is
used preciously," writes Black-
