233One turns with something like ferocity toward a land that one
loves, to which one is really and essentially native, to demand that
it surrender, reveal, that in itself which one loves. This is a vital
affair, not an affair of the heart (as it may be in one’s first poems),
but an affair of the whole being (as in one’s last poems), a
fundamental affair of life, or, rather, an affair of fundamental life;
so that one’s cry of O Jerusalem becomes little by little a cry to
something a little nearer and nearer until at last one cries out to
a living name, a living place, a living thing, and in crying out
confesses openly all the bitter secretions of experience. (OP260,
1948)I have moved from the end of Transport to Summerto An Ordinary Evening in
New Haven,the major long poem of Stevens’ next volume. That poem, and
the volume’s title poem, Auroras of Autumnexplore ways of saying farewell.
At the same time, Stevens increasingly writes short poems of peculiar force
and intensity that do not give the effect of meditating on farewells, except by
indirection. Randall Jarrell describes them as the work of a man “at once very
old and beyond the dominion of age; such men seem to have entered into (or
are able to create for us) a new existence, a world in which everything is
ELEANOR COOKLate Poems:
Places, Common and Other
FromPoetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens. © 1988 by Princeton University Press.