IN THE SACRED PARK
93
Youth as Virile Poet).
Could anything be more clear? Wanting to
concretize his view of the relation of poetry to reality, the image
which spontaneously came to Stevens's mind was of a spot where it
would be "pleasant to spend a holiday." In the same lecture he
defined poetry as "the unofficial view of being."
An amateur poet. But in arguing that, have I not argued too
much? For indubitably Stevens was a
great
poet. Now it was re–
marked at the outset that the great poet has
three
postures, though
he can be typified by only
one
of these, and that
if
the great poet
is
rich he
is
also poor. So f.ar I have tried only to set forth the essential
and characteristic limitation of Wallace Stevens. I have dealt only
with his poverty. But this poverty
is
interesting to us because it was
the foundation of a poetic fortune, in fact, one of the great poetic
fortunes of our time.
So Stevens must also have been a professional poet, a maker
and a craftsman of the very highf'llt order. And so indeed he was.
This
should be clear enough from the quality of
his
verse itself, and
from the fact that during some fifty years of writing he continued
to develop and perfect the instrument his amateur muse employed.
This
instrument
is
not at all of the sort the typical amateur poet finds
to hand at those moments when some occasion compels him to com–
pose. Most generally, your amateur poet relies on the conventional
rhetoric of his period. Now Stevens's rhetoric
is
a consummately pol–
ished one, tuned to his particular and special purposes. The crafts–
manship of Stevens's verse has been so well explored in Richard
Blackmur's justly famous essay, to which I referred before, that there
is no need to sa'- anything further on the subject. The point of in–
terest here is that the professional poet Stevens cannot but have
been was kept secret from the world, perhaps even from himself. Dur–
ing
the major part of his career Stevens consistently refused to
identify himself socially as a poet. In the last ten years of his life–
during which time there was a noticeable decline in the quality of
his
verse-he became more inclined to admit the existence of the
professional poet in himself. He published a book of essays on poetry,
The Necessary Angel,
and lectured on poetry at Princeton and at
Harvard. After his lecture at Harvard, though, he is reported to have
remarked to some of the students and literary men who heard him,
