92
PARTISAN REVIEW
placed in
context
with
the
objects
of
everybody's pleasure.
May
not
poetry, for Stevens, have
been
the language
of
vacations?
He
has
written:
How easily the feelings flow somewhere
Over the simplest words.
It is too cold for work now in the fields.
The value of my hypothesis is that with it in mind one can
see at once how subject matter is characteristically transformed in
Stevens's poetry. When he tried to handle some grave aspect of ex–
perience, love or death, for example, he was not free, rhetorically
free that is, to treat it without a certain deliberate lightness, and even
a touch of frivolity. Love becomes
...
a book too mad to read
Until one merely reads to pass the time.
Death becomes "the emperor of ice cream." Typically, when Stevens
wanted to write a poem about the workers, he described them, not
at their work in the factory, but in their idle enjoyment of Sunday
in the park.
1
He has written a poem about a dictator, whom he situ–
ated on a yacht named the "Masculine." Objects became poetic
for him when yielding to pleasurable inspection and released from
the serious contexts in which they generally inhere. He saw Lenin
-how?
On a bench beside a lake disturbed
By swans.
In a lecture he gave on the relation of imagination to reality,
wanting to exemplify his general view, what he called his "intimi–
dating thesis," Stevens remarked: "We must limit ourselves to say–
ing that there are so many things, which, as they are, and without
any intervention of the imagination, seem to be imaginative objects,
that it is no doubt true that absolute fact includes everything that
the imagination includes.... One sees demonstrations of this every–
where. For example, if we close our eyes and think of a place where
it would be pleasant to spend a holiday...."
(The Figure of the
1 Also noted by Delmore Schwartz, I believe, in the
Harvard Advocat,'s
Stevens number.
