WINGS OF WALLACE STEVENS 139Moore admired William Carlos Williams’s imaginative “power over the actual.”
It takes what Stevens calls “The poem of the act of the mind” to reveal the verve
of earth in pigeons sinking “on extended wings,” or in a “cold wind” above
“tufted rock / Massively rising high and bare / Beyond all trees.”
Late in life Stevens published “Essays on Reality and the Imagination” under
a title, The Necessary Angel, drawn from a recent poem:
Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again.This claim never faded. Poetry, for Stevens, offers the “supreme fictions” that
let us think of life. Through him we “see the earth again,” as in Dickinson’s
snaky “Whip lash / Unbraiding in the sun,” Frost ’s “Magnified apples... And
every fleck of russet showing clear.” Not that he wants us foisting our feelings
on things, but instead, imagining nature such as never before, like those “flaring
patches of snow” he first saw in the Rockies.
Pennsylvania-born and an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, he ’d
anticipated tropical richness in the “pungent fruit and bright, green wings” of
“Sunday Morning.” Later, Florida fired his imagination of earth and sea. “The
Idea of Order at Key West” features a woman singing and “It was her voice that
made / The sky acutest at its vanishing.” Tell me, he asks a companion there,
tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea.In other words—but enough of other words, Stevens has already spoken them!
Given his tropical bent, what will he make of a snow man’s bare imag-
inings?
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place