Modern American Poetry

Late Poems: Places, Common and Other 251

Beech Tree Books, 1986), vol. 1, p. 349. “Look for me in Sacred Pagodas,” Stevens wrote
when young (ibid., p. 340).

5. I find both Adelaide Kirby Morris and Milton Bates a shade accommodating in
   their assimilation of Stevens.


6. Geoffrey Hill, The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas(New York: Oxford
   University Press, 1984), pp. 16–17.


7. Stevens speaks of his ancestor, Gaspard de Châtillon, grandson of Coligny, “one
   of the great Protestant figures of his time,” in a letter to Paule Vidal, May 21, 1945 (WAS
   2887, Huntington Library, quoted by permission of Holly Stevens and the Huntington
   Library).


8. Cf. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and
   Modes(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), “Generic Names,” pp. 75–87.


9. Cf. T.S. Eliot: “It remained for Marlowe to discover, and Milton to perfect, the
   musical possibilities of classical names almost to a point of incantation” (Selected Essays,3d
   ed. [London: Faber & Faber, 1951], p. 103). Or cf. Ezra Pound: “I have read a reasonable
   amount of bad American magazine verse, pseudo-Masefieldian false pastoral and so on.
   Not one of the writers had the sense, which Mr Ford shows here, in calling up the reality
   of the Middle West by the very simple device of names” (Egoist2:1 [January 1,1915], 12).


10. Jacques Derrida offers a “library of Pierrots” in “The Double Session,”
    Dissemination,trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
    1972, 1981), p. 205n 23. The question of “specular doubling” is of interest for Stevens.


11. Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self(Berkeley and London: University of California
    Press, 1985), pp. 55–60 and passim.


12. Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the
    1960s(London and New York: Methuen, 1969, 1982), p. 110. David Walker distinguishes
    between poems written in the traditions of the dramatic monologue and dramatic lyric and
    those written as “transparent lyrics,” which replace “the lyric speaker with the reader as
    the center of dramatic attention” (The Transparent Lyric: Reading and Meaning in the Poetry
    of Stevens and Williams[Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], p. xii).


13. Commonplace Book, II, 12, WAS 70–73, Huntington Library, quoted by
    permission of Holly Stevens and the Huntington Library.


14. I am indebted for this point to Carolyn Masel.