Modern American Poetry

(^114) Helen Hennessy Vendler
Summer,as its title betrays, is the creed of the believer rather than the certain
projection of the prophet or the divided commentary of the skeptic, but its
intention cannot all command the strings. Its initial impetus of praise and
involvement, resolutely kept in the original moment, is maintained through
the first three cantos, but from then on the oneness with the here and now
diminishes, until by the end of the poem Stevens is at an inhuman distance
from his starting point.
Stevens is fully conscious of his wish to bask in the present and of the
forces working against it, chiefly his natural asceticism and his equally
natural intellectuality. As always, his protagonists represent aspects of
himself, and so the vanishing present object is not only gripped in savage
scrutiny by one Stevens, but also avoided by another:
It was difficult to sing in face
Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves
Or else avert the object.
It is no longer enough to be an onlooker, as it was for the shears-man with
the blue guitar, who wanted “to be the lion in the lute/ Before the lion locked
in stone,” his life spent in an eternal mirroring of the world. That
spectatorship has turned into an immersion in the scene, a scene which is at
once fully made by the poet, fully apparent of itself, and fully found, as if left,
like Whitman’s grass, designedly dropped. This mode of the this, the here,
and the now, so remarkably difficult to maintain at any length, gives a
suspense to the progress of both poems, as the tenuous identity of man and
environmental moment is sought, precariously supported, and, finally, lost.
The identity dissolves, of course, with the entrance of the analytic
mind, with the change from description to interrogation. This questioning
occurs halfway through the ten cantos of Credences of Summer,and entirely
pervades The Auroras of Autumn:in both cases the central question forces its
way to the surface, almost against the speaker’s will. In Credences of Summer
the question, already quoted, asks the relation of the present to its context in
time:
One day enriches a year ...
Or do the other days enrich the one?
In The Auroras of Autumnthe question looks for the relation of insight to
sight, or the envisaged to the now: