Modern American Poetry

(^238) Eleanor Cook
in “St. Armorer’s was once an immense success, / It rose loftily and stood
massively” (CP529). The tone makes us supply quotation marks: “St.
Armorer’s was once an ‘immense success,’ ” etc. The attack here will offend
no one. In fact, it is Stevens’ retrievals from Christianity rather than his
attacks that sometimes cause offense. Such retrievals as “God and the
imagination are one” or the end of St. Armorer’s Church from the Outsideare
variously read. The orthodox are sometimes angered, while those more
accommodating sometimes assimilate Stevens a shade too easily into the
Christian fold.^5 (He did say, after all, that his aim was to make the
Archbishop of Canterbury jump off the end of the dock.) Geoffrey Hill’s
phrase is both generous and rightly placed: “magnificent agnostic faith.”^6
Stevens’ echoing in the late lyrics is very quiet for the most part. We
are unlikely to hear it unless we have attended to the earlier, louder,
combative echoes. It is as if he were smiling to himself at the old battles,
remembering them clearly but softly, now past combat. When he does send
echoes to war, he signals his procedure very clearly. Thus in In the Element of
Antagonisms: “Birds twitter pandemoniums around / The idea of the
chevalier of chevaliers” (CP426). Keats and Milton and Hopkins are once
more recalled, though not as in the quiet closing of Sunday Morningbut “in
the element of antagonisms.” Stevens uses a different verb from To Autumn
(“twitter,” not “whistle”) and a discordant noise from Paradise Lost(though
without a capital) in order to attack a “chevalier of chevaliers” (“O my
chevalier,” said Hopkins of a bird). Or rather, to attack such an “idea.”
Medieval bird debate could hardly do better.
I hear little of Stevens’ extraordinary metaleptic or leaping-over
echoes, as for example the leap of the mockingbirds over Keats. I hear little
of his extraordinary hearing-through echoes, as for example we gradually
hear Milton’s serene angelic gaze through Wordsworth. In This Solitude of
Cataracts,the echoing takes disagreement for granted, and goes back from
Wordsworth to end with Milton and the unusual wish to possess a Miltonic
or biblical sense of the world. Other old echoes are reechoed: Theseus on the
lover, the lunatic, and the poet: “The lover, the believer and the poet. / Their
words are chosen out of their desire ... The lover writes, the believer hears,
/ The poet mumbles” (CP441–43). Or the Exodus journey: “These locusts
by day, these crickets by night” (CP489). And Stevens reechoes his own
work, time and again. “Oto-otu-bre” from Metamorphosiscomes back: “Otu-
bre’s lion-roses have turned to paper / And the shadows of trees / Are liked
wrecked umbrellas” (CP506).
Among other old subjects, we might note the late form of Florida as
Madame la Fleurie, a wicked fairy-tale earth mother whose reality awaits us