382 Making It New: 1900–1945
meaning, is the offspring of this marriage (Notes, I, iii). And what Stevens called
“poverty” or “the malady of the quotidien” (“The Ordinary Women” (1923), “The
Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” (1923)) – a sense of melancholy and futility – comes
when the marriage fails; when, for example, the world is too much with us and
the mind becomes a passive instrument (“Depression Before Spring” (1923)) – or,
alternatively, when the mind escapes from the pressures of the world altogether and
withdraws into solipsism and daydreaming (“Esthétique du Mal,” xv (1944)).
“A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.” This, from The Necessary
Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1956), offers a variation on the sexual
metaphor; and it is also a reminder of just how seductive, for Stevens, was the fig-
ure of the poet. For Stevens was no less of a Romantic in this, his tendency to see
the fabulator, the maker of poems, as a latter-day prophet: someone who creates
the myths that give meaning to people’s lives and so enables them to survive – and
who offers an example to his audience, by showing them how to devise their own
myths as well as listen to his. The poet’s function, Stevens insisted, “is to help people
live their lives.” In effect, he returned the poet to his ancient role of bard or myth-
maker, offering purpose and a sense of meaning to his tribe. And to this he added
another, more peculiarly Romantic and American dimension, which was that of
the hero. For the poet, Stevens suggested, is his own hero because his mind,
his representative imagination, is the catalyst of events. Instead of a third-person
protagonist, the poet, the “I” of the poem, occupies the center of the stage; there, as
Stevens puts it in “Of Modern Poetry” (1942), “like an insatiable actor, slowly and /
with meditation,” he speaks words and acts out a drama to which
an invisible audience listens
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.
Just what, in detail, the poet/actor spoke of, and what his audience attended to,
was explained elsewhere in Stevens’s work. “Poetry,” he declared in “The Man With
the Blue Guitar” (1937), “... must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns.”
Like so many of his great, nineteenth-century predecessors – and, in particular, like
his mentor, the philosopher George Santayana (1863–1952) – Stevens was convinced
that the old religious myths had crumbled into irrelevance. So poetry had to act now
as an agent of redemption. The poet had to replace the priest, Art had to replace
the liturgy of the church, Imaginative belief – “belief ... in a fiction, which you know
to be a fiction” – had to replace religious faith. And a possible earthly paradise,
created here and now out of the marriage between mind and world, had to replace
the vision of a heavenly paradise, situated in some great hereafter. “The great poems
of heaven and hell have been written,” said Stevens, “and the great poem of earth
remains to be written.” The opposition this announces is at once the motive and
the subject of much of his work. It is, for example, central to “Sunday Morning,” one
of the finest pieces in Harmonium. In it the poet conducts a meditation through a
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