become the credible, imagination to become fact,
‘‘brilliantest descriptions of new day, / Before it
comes’’ to be a ‘‘just anticipation.’’ As Stevens writes
in ‘‘Evening Without Angels,’’ describing an
‘‘accord of repetitions,’’ this order means that
‘‘desire for day’’ will be ‘‘Accomplished in the
immensely flashing East’’ (111). Repetitive poetics
therefore avoids what ‘‘Notes’’ describes as a noc-
turnal pseudomajesty, a solipsistic imagination that
is no more than ‘‘Cinderella fulfilling herself’’ (350).
If fiction expects the morning to come, the stroke of
midnight will not dispel one’s poems as fairy-tale
delusions; rather, the new day will confirm them as
fact. This is the poetic abstraction that the first
section of ‘‘Notes’’ would enact, a ‘‘calendar
hymn’’ (330) in which the ‘‘hoobla-how’’ (331) of
night makes a ‘‘strange relation’’ with the ‘‘hoobla-
hoo’’ of day. It is the change that the second part of
‘‘Notes’’ would find, a repetition that is not the
monotonous drone of the same but the interde-
pendence of ‘‘day on night, the imagined // On the
real’’ (339). It is, finally, the pleasure that the last
section of ‘‘Notes’’ achieves: even in a world that is
‘‘not ourselves’’ (332) the ‘‘freshness’’ (344) of
worldly transformation can be ‘‘the freshness of
ourselves.’’ ‘‘Time will write them down,’’ Stevens
says of these refreshments; in the timely ‘‘round’’
(350) of natural repetitions, a poet can make reality
his own.
This discovery aligns Stevens with some of his
philosophical predecessors, thinkers who also
accepted a post-Kantian and post-theological set-
ting while still seeking both certainty and freedom.
George Santayana’s ‘‘animal faith,’’ for instance,
‘‘posits existence whereexistence is’’ (104), and
William James defines our ‘‘accord’’ with reality
as ‘‘the one strictly underived and original contri-
bution which we make to the world’’ (579); in daily
recurrence Stevens makes a modernist practice of
Santayana’s positings and manifests both the
effort and the accomplishment of James’s accord.
If the poet knew as early as ‘‘Sunday Morning’’
that humanity’s ‘‘unsponsored, free’’ existence
nonetheless resides in an ‘‘old dependency of day
and night’’ (56), his later verse builds from that
dependence all that a sponsorless, skeptical Sun-
day seems to lack.
Stevens’s poetry, therefore, also anticipates
Stanley Cavell’s thought, which finds a solution
to skepticism in an ‘‘attainment of the everyday’’
(New77) and a ‘‘willing repetition of days’’ (Quest
178). Cavell’s philosophy helps to explain why
language should be central to this repetition; his
developmentofordinarylanguage philosophy dis-
covers that ordinary, iterable words provide the
same access to an unknowable reality as do ordi-
nary, iterable days. The experience of Stevens’s
actual world is thus a ‘‘vulgate of experience’’ (Col-
lected397), a ‘‘lingua franca’’ (343) that would
‘‘compound the imagination’s Latin’’; with its con-
cluding description of an earthly ‘‘Fat girl’’ (351),
‘‘Notes’’ demonstrates that everyday repetition
allows one to name and rename reality. For Ste-
vens, to remake language that has been used
before, to find the novel resonance in familiar
signification, is to wield ‘‘proper’’ (349) speech; as
the etymological play of ‘‘proper’’ itself suggests,
the resulting words can be both appropriate to the
world and appropriated by the mind. Such con-
fidence links Stevens to contemporaries like Jean
Paulhan, moreover, as well as to later thinkers like
Cavell: inThe Flowers Tarbes, Paulhan, whose
work Stevens knew well, argues that a reassertion
of rhetoric can overcome the ‘‘terror’’ (79) of dual-
istic skepticism with a conscious adoption of the
familiar and precedented. Like Stevens, Paulhan
emphasizes repeated ‘‘rediscover[y],’’ within stand-
ard forms, of ‘‘the original joy of the first commit-
ment, when our spirit accepted having a body’’
(93). The ‘‘nobility’’ that he finds in this recurrent
originality endorses the ‘‘mastery’’ that Stevens
knows in his faithful rebeginnings. For both writ-
ers, accepting repetition allows necessity to
empower subjective freedom and distinct subjec-
tivity to know necessary truth: in his approach to
everyday time, Stevens joins this twentieth-century
philosophical project.
We should not be surprised, therefore, that
Stevens wished to ‘‘write of the normal in a normal
way’’ (Letters287) or advised a friend to ‘‘keep on
going round and round in the same old way’’
(Huntington WAS 3483, 18 Nov. 1940) or held
so fast to his own routine way of life. Indeed,
Stevens’s rounds allow us to amend the long
debate about whether he is a poet of idealist
abstractions or realistic fact; his quotidian repeti-
tions describe a world of repeated interdependence
between the imagined andthe actual. Recurrence
reveals how the commonplace can be ‘‘a middle
ground,’’ in Longenbach’s words, ‘‘that was not a
compromise between extremes’’ (viii). Emphasiz-
ing recurrence thus counters a critical tendency to
read Stevens’s attention to the commonplace as an
aversion to the imagination. The result often sup-
ports the antisubjectivist version of the poet that is
now dominant: even Longenbach, for example,
describes the ordinary as less a middle groundOf Modern Poetry