Modern American Poetry

(^234) Eleanor Cook
enlarged and yet no more than itself, transfigured and yet beyond the need
of transfiguration.”^1
It is hard to find a language in which to speak well of these
extraordinary late lyrics. We speak again and again of a sense of doubleness
in them, of the strange and right combining of the everyday and the
visionary. The everyday and the visionary come together yet are held apart,
before us; or, to change the metaphor, we cross easily back and forth from
one area to the other. Things familiar and ordinary live in tension with their
own unfamiliarity and extraordinariness. There is no sense of blocking, and
this is one difference from the early poems. It is not at all that outside place
and the order of words are made to sound stable. It is that the word “stable”
and the inside-outside metaphor seem insufficient, even wrong. In Things of
August,for example, are we inside or outside the egg?
Spread sail, we say, spread white, spread way.
The shell is a shore....
Spread outward. Crack the round dome. Break through....
Outside if we are cracking a breakfast egg, and inside if we are cracking the
old egg of the world. The egg turns inside out and outside in (and we all
began in or as an egg), like words themselves: “It is a world of words to the
end of it” (which we usually misread through insufficient attention to the
word “it”). In the opening poems, the figures seemed to belong properly to
neither mimetic nor legendary nor allegorical worlds. The figures in these
late poems seem to belong properly to different worlds at the same time.
Stevens admits what he can of older tropes, legends, beliefs, ideas, and even
some old ghosts. He has tried them as by fire, and he knows to the last
syllable what he can allow into his poetic world.
Thematically, these are poems of last things, of memories, of
repetitions, of attentuations, yet also of a fierce will to live and a love of this
earth. They are poems of being at home yet also of seeking home. (It is little
wonder that the Ulysses figure reappears in force.) Generically, we may
usefully think of some as tombeau or epitaph poems, as Charles Berger
suggests,^2 or as testamentary poems. There is a high proportion of fluency
poems, this subgenre being appropriate for a man musing on the river of
time.
Much of Stevens’ familiar word-play is here, with his tactics often
foregrounded. From the beginning, Stevens’ lines could do what they
described. From the beginning, Stevens could find language for his methods
of doing and describing. These late poems are different in the simplicity and