Making It New: 1900–1945 383woman whose mind is the scene, which has as its focus the choice between two
alternatives. One alternative is the vision of paradise proposed to us by the Christian
faith, “The holy hush of ancient sacrifice”: a vision founded upon the belief that
since this is a universe of death, never answering to our desires, then we must look
for our satisfactions in another dimension. The other alternative is the vision of an
earthly paradise. The universe, the poet admits, may well be a universe of death
when looked at in its pristine state, but it can perhaps be transformed into a living,
constantly changing “mundo” with the help of the active imagination. It is, of course,
the second alternative that is ultimately preferred. Believing that “The greatest
poverty is not to live / In a physical world,” the poet ends his meditation with a
hymn to the earth: as “At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous
undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” Beautifully
poised between motion and rest, the perfect stillness of an artifact, a thing of the
mind, and the movement, the restlessness and changeableness (and the odor of
death) which belongs to the things of this world, the closing lines illustrate why
Stevens is commonly regarded as one of the modern masters in blank verse.
The particular spot of earth that Stevens hymned in “Sunday Morning” and
elsewhere was almost exclusively American – an important point because, as Stevens
put it in one of his very last poems, “a mythology reflects its region.” “The gods of
China,” he insisted in “A Mythology Reflects its Region” (1957), “are always Chinese”;
that is, the world the imagination embraces is always a specific, local one, and the
fictions created out of that embrace must bear the stamp of their locality. “One turns
with something like ferocity toward a land that one loves,” he said in an essay in
Opus Posthumous, “... to demand that it surrender, reveal, that in itself which
one loves.” As Stevens saw it, this marriage between a particular person and place,
was “a vital affair, not an affair of the heart ... but an affair of the whole being, a
fundamental affair of life.” It was not simply a matter of idiom and gesture, in other
words, but of identity and vision. Of course, the paraphernalia of American culture
is there in Stevens’s poems – things like coffee, saxophones, and large sombreros –
and, like Whitman, Stevens uses a rich, polyglot language that shows he has fallen in
love with American names. But these things matter less, as a mark of origin, than the
fact that Stevens chose as his starting point what he called in “The Sail of Ulysses”
(1957) “human loneliness / A part of space and solitude.” Like every great American
poet, in fact, he began with the isolated consciousness – Whitman’s “essential Me” –
and then progressed from there to the new dimensions, the moments of self-
assertion or communion, which that consciousness struggles gamely to create.
Here, however, we are confronted with a crucial paradox in Stevens’s work. Like
other American writers, Stevens began with the isolated self, the separate mind and
its world. Unlike most of them, however, he then moved in two quite different
directions. One direction is centripetal and recalls that arch-egotist and solipsist,
Edgar Allan Poe. The self, Stevens insists, devises its own world, which the poem
then imitates in that it is closed and autonomous, a durable integration of experience.
The other recalls Emily Dickinson. For Stevens can be quite as insistent that the self
is limited, transient, and that the worlds or works it creates must carry the imprintGGray_c04.indd 383ray_c 04 .indd 383 8 8/1/2011 7:53:53 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 53 AM