POETRY CHRONICLE
657
ascending spiral up which Walt Whitman glides with so much ease
In
his best poems:
There is no stoppage and never c'an be stoppage,
If I , you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their
surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a p>.allid float,
it would not avail in the long run,
We should surely bring up again where we now stand,
And surely go as much farth er, and then farth er and farther.
Poe turned both these images upside down. The ascending spiral, viewed
from Poe's end, became his descent into the maelstrom, and he managed
to contract Emerson's expanding circle back to its vanishing point at
the horrifying close of
Eureka.
These opposed tendencies continued to
operate for later artists, creating great difficulties. Some went down
the spiral and some went up, but those who, like the grand old Duke
of York, were only halfway up, were neither up nor down:
Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline.
Emerson argued: "There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circum–
ference to us." But finding his expanding circle a well at last, later poets
have tried various compromises. With no place to go, the cosmic pro–
gression into infinity is replaced by the eternal return, and endless ex–
pansion by repetition.
I should like to go back now to Mr. Pack's
A Stranger's Privilege
and consider it in this context. 'One of the Emersonian notes about Mr.
Pack is that the universe begins within oneself, and one never quite
knows whether it is anywhere else or not. I once tried to show in another
place that, despite his unfair abuse of Emerson, Wallace Stevens's think–
ing
shaped up very similarly in the end. Stevens no less than Emerson
might have claimed: "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing;
I see all ... I am part or parcel of God." Stevens called this universal
solvent Imagination and Emerson called it 'Oversoul, but it amounted
to much the same thing in the end. The main difference was that the
imagination for Stevens (at least until his last poems in "The Rock,"
which are the most Emersonian of all) was constantly recalled to the
particulars of
things
in a somewhat limiting sense. Expansibility had
bounds. The Emersonian note in Mr. Pack undoubtedly comes by way
of Stevens, for I know of no poet who has used Stevens' influence more
intelligently or sensitively. But "The Fall" must serve for the basis of
the very little I can say here. My badly mutilated quotation begins half–
way through the poem-Adam speaking:
