Modern American Poetry

Introduction 7

WALLACE STEVENS

“Leave the many and hold the few,” Emerson advises in his late poem
“Terminus,” thus sanctioning the democratic poet, like Whitman, in the
pragmatic address to an actual elite. Stevens needed little sanctioning as
to audience, but he was rather anxious about his own constant emphasis
upon the self as solitary “scholar,” and his recourse was to plead
“poverty.” He cannot have been unaware that both “scholar” and
“poverty” in his rather precise senses were Emersonian usages. A great
coverer of traces, Stevens may be judged nevertheless to have turned
more to a tradition than to a man. American Romanticism found its last
giant in Stevens, who defines the tradition quite as strongly as it informs
him.
“The prologues are over.... It is time to choose,” and the Stevens I
think we must choose writes the poems not of an empty spirit in vacant
space, but of a spirit so full of itself that there is room for nothing else. This
description hardly appears to flatter Stevens, yet I render it in his praise.
Another of his still neglected poems, for which my own love is intense, is
entitled simply “Poem with Rhythms”:

The hand between the candle and the wall

Grows large on the wall.

The mind between this light or that and space,

(This man in a room with an image of the world,

That woman waiting for the man she loves,)

Grows large against space:

There the man sees the image clearly at last.

There the woman receives her lover into her heart

And weeps on his breast, though he never comes.

It must be that the hand

Has a will to grow larger on the wall,

To grow larger and heavier and stronger than

The wall; and that the mind

Turns to its own figurations and declares,

“This image, this love, I compose myself

Of these. In these, I come forth outwardly.

In these, I wear a vital cleanliness,