critic of Stevens’s ordinary habits, would see the
resulting amenability as an attainment of Stevens’s
prized ‘‘ordinary world,’’the place where ‘‘Stevens
wrote all his best poems’’ (93). It seems, however,
more like a first, failed version of that realm, as the
comedian’s quotidian denies poetry altogether; his
everyday course must choose between the mind’s
‘‘flights’’ (Stevens,Collected31) and reality’s facts.
Stevens more successfully realizes the promise of
the ordinary in ‘‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,’’
when the speaker can do ‘‘all that angels can’’ and
also remain ‘‘like men’’ (350): desire for an unrec-
urrent ‘‘final slate’’ (81) from ‘‘The Man Whose
Pharynx Was Bad’’ yields here to an appreciation
of ‘‘going round’’ (350) as a ‘‘final good,’’ and
‘‘Grotesque apprenticeship to chance event’’ (32)
from ‘‘The Comedian as the Letter C’’ becomes a
‘‘master[y]’’ of ‘‘repetition’’ (350). Stevens’s daily
recurrence, his conscious human mimicry of a
diurnally rotating globe, masters a rhythmic inter-
dependence of mind and world.
Stevens’s search for the ‘‘inaccessible jewel’’ of
the ‘‘normal,’’ therefore, is a ‘‘difficult pursuit’’
(Letters521) rather than an easy assumption, as
it inscribes a quest for the most central and prob-
lematic relation in his poetry. That relation is also
the most central and problematic relation in
criticism of his poetry, and various readings of
Stevens have suggested virtually every possible
account of the mind-world dichotomy. None,
though, has fully articulated how the ‘‘habitual,
customary’’ (767) mode that was to Stevens ‘‘a
large part of the normality of the normal’’ can
obviate the realistic submission of the comedian
as well as the romantic rebellion of the man whose
pharynx was bad. In ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme
Fiction’’ and ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New
Haven’’ Stevens exploresthe means: the repetition
of daily time combines renewal and replication,
beginnings and returns, so that each new morning
offers both a fresh conception to create and a
known standard to expect. One might repeatedly
invent, but invent what will be; repeatedly imag-
ine, but imagine what will truly appear.
Mornings and evenings might be promises,
that is, and ‘‘promises kept’’ (403), to use the phras-
ing of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.’’
Extending the ordinary world on which ‘‘Notes’’
concludes, this later poem provides the fullest expli-
cation of the recurrent temporality that to Stevens
makes up the quotidian: a round of ‘‘blue day’’ (400)
and ‘‘branchings after day,’’ a calendric cycle of
‘‘feasts and the habits ofsaints’’ (402), a fluent
alternationinwhich‘‘sunishalftheworld’’(411)
and dark ‘‘is the other half.’’ As Christopher Miller
notes (200), this poem is governed by Stevens’s
‘‘figure like Ecclesiast’’ (Collected 409), whose
chant finds a ‘‘sense in the changing sense//Of
things’’; no less than the biblical text, Stevens’s
ordinary scripture focuses on the same-but-
different repetition endemic to everyday time.
The pattern, Stevens writes, offers a ‘‘permanence
composed of impermanence,’’
So that the approaching sun and its arrival,
Its evening feast and the following festival,
This faithfulness of reality, this mode,
This tendance and venerable holding-in
Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces.
(403)
The faithfulness of diurnal time renders ‘‘hallu-
cinations’’ and actual ‘‘surfaces’’ inseparable; every
nocturnal ‘‘phrase’’ of the ‘‘spirit’’ (403), as the next
canto specifies, can turn to a sunlit ‘‘fact.’’ Through
‘‘propounding’’ (404) of natural cycles, subjective
‘‘making in the mind’’ (403) is objective truth.
The process is not absolute, Stevens knows.
Earthly changes do not proceed with the monoto-
nous exactitude of lunar cycles, just as earthly
repetition, in ‘‘Notes,’’ remains ‘‘eccentric’’ (350)
rather than strictly measured. Stevens’s quotidian
provides the poet’s favorite paradox of consistent
innovation or dependable novelty; its pattern is
not the relentless dailiness of ‘‘The Man Whose
Pharynx Was Bad,’’ then, but the ceaseless night-
and-day renewal of ‘‘The Well Dressed Man with
a Beard’’ (224). And if in ‘‘Notes’’ the ‘‘first idea’’ is
an ‘‘immaculate beginning’’ (330), in ‘‘An Ordinary
Evening in New Haven’’ ‘‘original earliness... is a
daily sense’’ (410). One might use that sense of
originality every day, ‘‘re-creat[ing]’’ what is ‘‘pos-
sible’’ (411); daily time provides a repeated chance
for the ‘‘new orations’’ (81) that ‘‘The Man Whose
Pharynx Was Bad’’ covets and for the ‘‘original
relation’’ (Emerson 7) that American romanticism
has sought since Emerson. As they realize ‘‘Con-
ceptions of new mornings of new worlds,’’ in the
phrase of ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ (401), these
diurnal returns do not enervate creativity but
demand and endorse it. Each sunrise marks a
reliable revelation as ‘‘that which was incredible
becomes / In misted contours, credible day again.’’
That ‘‘again’’—that faithful ‘‘tendance’’ (403)—
is vital. Only an order in which ‘‘old stars are planets
of morning’’ (301), as in ‘‘Description Without
Place,’’ a rotation in which the known past enables
the unknown future, allows the incredible toOf Modern Poetry