Modern American Poetry

(^272) Edward Hirsch
the basis for Stevens’s radical humanism, his belief that the modern poet
must rediscover the earth. In the essay “Imagination as Value” he wrote,
“The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem
of the earth remains to be written.”^56 Stevens’s own goal was to write that
earthly poem. He came to believe in the imagination, the gaiety of language
he defined as poetry, as the consoling force in a world bereft of certainty:
“After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes
its place as life’s redemption.”^57 The refusal to accept the consolations of
orthodox Christianity or of any revealed religion is the subject of Stevens’s
first major poem of earth, “Sunday Morning.” It was through his
aestheticism and sensibility, the mind turning to the world of sensations and
the splendors of its own productions rather than to the certainties of false
belief, that Stevens traced the visionary company.
In HarmoniumStevens expresses a strong determination to be true to
one’s own inner experiences and sensations. Many of his poems record a
world of exquisitely changing surfaces and appearances, things moving
rapidly in the external flux of experience. Such lyrics as “Thirteen Ways of
Looking at a Blackbird,” “Six Significant Landscapes,” “Metaphors of a
Magnifico,” and “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” are a collection of sensations,
naturalistic notes of the eye recording natural phenomena. At the same time
they track the interrelationship between mind and landscape, the solitary
consciousness reacting to an external and wholly separate world which
cannot be known apart from our awareness of it. Poems of appearance are
also poems of perception. The self, too, is an unstable, fluctuating element in
a world of flux. “The Comedian as the Letter C” asks, “Can one man think
one thing and think it long? / Can one man be one thing and be it long?”^58
The implicit answer: no. Stevens’s skeptical intelligence refused to rest in any
single certainty or explanation of the world.
For Stevens, the imagination acts as a way to order a constantly
changing and chaotic world. It takes the place of empty heaven. In the
parable “Anecdote of the Jar,” the speaker places a jar in Tennessee and the
jar organizes the “slovenly wilderness”: “The wilderness rose up to it, / And
sprawled around, no longer wild.”^59 Thus the human artifact, emblem of the
imagination, structures everything around it. The mind transforms the place,
creating order out of wilderness. At the same time the mind doesn’t create a
single unchanging or “true” world, but only versions of that world. Every
new jar, every new combination of words also creates a new window, a fresh
revelation about reality itself. This helps to account for the range of tones in
Harmonium—from the verbal gaudiness of “Bantams in Pine Woods” and
“The Emperor of Ice Cream” to the solemn musings of “The Snow Man”