Modern American Poetry

Introduction 9

figurations, but he sees himself cleansed in the vitalizing mirror of will as he
could never hope to see himself in the mere outwardness of air. Whitman
oddly but beautifully persuades us of a dramatic poignance that his actual
solipsism does not earn, while Stevens rather less beautifully knows only the
non-dramatic truth of his own fine desperation.
What then is Stevens giving us? What do we celebrate with and in him
when he leads us to celebrate? His vigorous affirmation, “The Well Dressed
Man with a Beard,” centers on “a speech / Of the self that must sustain itself
on speech.” Is eloquence enough? I turn again to the fountain of our will,
Emerson, who had the courage to insist that eloquence was enough, because
he identified eloquence with “something unlimited and boundless,” in the
manner of Cicero. Here is Stevens mounting through eloquence to his
individual sense of “something unlimited and boundless,” a “something” not
beyond our apprehension:

Last night at the end of night his starry head,

Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness, part

Thereof and part desire and part the sense

Of what men are. The collective being knew

There were others like him safely under roof:

The captain squalid on his pillow, the great

Cardinal, saying the prayers of earliest day;

The stone, the categorical effigy;

And the mother, the music, the name; the scholar,

Whose green mind bulges with complicated hues:

True transfigurers fetched out of the human mountain,

True genii for the diminished, spheres,

Gigantic embryos of populations,

Blue friends in shadows, rich conspirators,

Confiders and comforters and lofty kin.

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

A critic who has learned, ruefully, to accept the reductive view that