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been a bit nearer sunset, the particular hills I gazed at so
long would have been very much like the steps to the Throne.
And Blake's angels would have been there with their "Holy,
Holy, Holy."
637
The Wordsworthian opportunity is seen but not taken. From his
Snowdon of the Palisades Stevens looks down on the particular shad–
fisher and "certain hills," all economically described. The view has the
more than natural radiance of a Wordsworthian scene, but Stevens
does not impute its look to a benevolent power in Nature. The vague
forms in the valley take whatever shape the imagination gives them,
but this triumph of the mind is part of the situation; Stevens does not
stop to comment on it. The metaphors of sublimity with which the
passage ends are conscious additions. The motive for metaphor here
is extension, not definition. The sublime is one potential of this
actual scene.
An early, necessary and constant angel of reality for Stevens was
his wife, Elsie. (Her profile, sculpted by Adolph Alexander Weinman,
was the liberty head on the old dime and fifty-cent piece.) Stevens
wrote
to
her of "the touch of you organizing me again":
It is as if I were in the proverbial far country and never
knew how much I had become estranged from the actual
reality of the things that are the real things of my heart, un–
til the actual reality found a voice-you are the voice- ...
-What am I then? Something that but for you would be
terribly unreal. A dreamy citizen of a native place-of which
I am no citizen at all.
As the reality Stevens discussed
III
his letters became increasingly
that of poetry, the movement of his mind became proportionately
easier to observe, forming images, testing them as suitable fictions and
bringing them back down again into prose for a precis. From
the mid-thirties onward, Stevens' running commentary on his poetry
had a declarative intensity matched in recent times only by Malcolm
Lowry's famous defense of
Under the Volcano
and Frost's letters
about "the sound of sense." Often the phrases of description rival
those in the poems; out of context, many resemble Stevens' "Adagia":
"The order of the spirit is the only music
oIf
the spheres: or, rather,
the only music." "What the spirit wants it creates." "A strong mind
distorts the world." "With a true poet his poetry is the same thing as his
vital self. It is not possible for anyone else to touch it." He compares
an inadequate fiction in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" to "Harry
