636
HELEN McNEIL
strong enough to check even the evasions of the "fat girl, terrestrial,"
his muse the earth. When letters reveal that a stunning poet was also
a prig, a conniver or a Fascist, the shock is not entirely unpleasant:
it brings Ariel back down to earth. The public poet is most vulnerable
to this kind of spiritual scandal; the crackerbarrel Robert Frost
created the audience that found him out. Stevens was not a public
man, but he too can be embarrassed. He calls Negroes "coons," he
has no sympathy for indigent poets (Kenneth Patchen, Dylan Thomas)
and he ends a cavilling letter about his friend William Carlos Williams'
possible "subversive" affiliations with a snobbish
non sequitur
about
Williams' debt to the government because of his descent from recent
immigrants.
But this is beside the point. Stevens' letters are unique among
those of modern poets because they consistently show the mind of the
poems at work on everyday life. There are few confidences and no
letters that look as if they were taking the place of a poem that should
have been written. They have the power of perception, if not the
power of feeling, that Keats's letters have. They show a man we would
not have known without them, a consciousness profoundly committed
to the examination of its own effect on the real.
Stevens' early journals (unfortunately only haphazardly included
in this collection) already relished the appearances of the real. In
themselves they are a brilliant example of an American consciousness
at the turn of the century. On the same day in 1899 that he found
Endymion
"intoxicating," Stevens observed a raindrop falling from a
clemantis vine and decided that exactly such "quick, unexpected, com–
monplace things" should be noted down
by
poets. He found it "a
monstrous pleasure
to
be specific about such a thing." His character–
istic consciousness is already present in this account of a walk in 1904:
The cedars glittered in the dismal woods. At the terminus of
my walk, to call it so, I went to the edge of the Palisades, that
having been my route,
&
lay on my belly on the top of one
of the cliffs. This is something of an adventure for a man
subject to being dizzy. Even a gull, some distance below me
seemed to
be
conscious that it was flying high. But it was
infinitely agreeable to listen to the shore
so
far below
&
to
mark a catamaran of bricks sailing by
&
to see a wily shad–
fisher feeding excelsior to his goats. More, I watched the sun
as it came from behind patches of cloud light up certain
hills, while the others lay in shadow . . . From a hill that
overlooks a proper valley other hills look like very decent
waves or like clouds or like great ships. No doubt,
if
it had
