Modern American Poetry

(^176) Richard Poirier
something that imagination could createas an alternative form of experience.
Stevens himself very beautifully argues the case, using metaphors of “home”
and “extra-vagance,” in Part One of “Three Academic Pieces”:
... the intensification of reality by resemblance increases
realization and this increased realization is pleasurable. It is as if
a man who lived indoors should go outdoors on a day of
sympathetic weather. His realization of the weather would exceed
that of a man who lives outdoors. It might, in fact, be intense
enough to convert the real world about him into an imagined
world. In short, a sense of reality keen enough to be in excess of
the normal sense of reality creates a reality of its own. Here what
matters is that the intensification of the sense of reality creates a
resemblance: that reality of its own is a reality. This may be going
round a circle, first clockwise, then anti-clockwise. If the savor of
life is the savor of reality, the fact will establish itself whichever
way one approaches it.
True “realization” for Frost occurs afterthe man who went outdoors
comes back in. “I opened the door so my last look / Should be taken outside
a house and book.” Thus Frost begins a poem called “One More Brevity,” in
his last volume. But the “look,” while a perfectly “extravagant” one, in that it
is beyond both “home” and literature, is really a way of assuring himself that
the stars are in place so that he may sleep more securely: “I said I would see
how Sirius kept / His watchdog eye on what remains/ To be gone into if not
explained.” “Intensifications” while “out of doors” are not in themselves a
true form of “realization,” so far as Frost is concerned, since the very nature
of metaphor involves for him a constant pressure, at some point,against
intensifications and the excesses that go with them. Quite charmingly, while
the man is looking up at the star Sirius a dog slips by “to be my problem
guest: / Not a heavenly dog made manifest, / But an earthly dog of the
carriage breed.” This is a fine example of what Frost means when he says “I
would be willing to throw away everything else but that: enthusiasm tamed
by metaphor” (“Education by Poetry”).
For Stevens, on the other hand, metaphor, or “resemblances,” creates
the conditions for enthusiasm:
... it is not too extravagant to think of resemblances and of the
repetition of resemblances as a source of the ideal. In short,
metaphor has its aspect of the ideal. This aspect of it cannot be