than a locus for Stevens’s ‘‘carefully modulated
effort to assert the historicity of poetry and the
political power of poets’’ (279), and Filreis equates
Stevens’s interest in routine with his interest in
‘‘historical conditions’’ (Actual xviii); Liesl Olson
opposes Stevens’s interest in the ordinary with
his possible investment in ‘‘imaginative vision’’
(‘‘Ordinary’’ 159). Such readings overlook the
fact that Stevens’s quotidian world could be timely
but not political and creative but not ethereal:
what ‘‘An Ordinary Evening’’ calls a ‘‘total double-
thing’’ (Collected402) of both subjectivity and
empiricism. Only by describing this everyday
realm accurately can we understand why the quo-
tidian should be so vital an end, and so unifying a
means, for Stevens’s art and life.
Only by such description, moreover, can we
understand Stevens’s naturalism, so often slighted.
Naturalism distinguishes my analysis of Stevens’s
everyday poetics from critical accounts that note
his vacillations ‘‘up and down between imagination
and reality’’ (Richardson,Early241): the move-
ment between these two, inStevens’s view, is not
a psychological variable but an environmental fact.
A recurrence of real and unreal constitutes one’s
real setting; the physical globe is that ‘‘gay tourna-
monde’’ (406) sought by the professor in ‘‘An Ordi-
nary Evening,’’ that ‘‘world in which things
revolve’’ (Huntington WAS 3305, 27 Jan. 1950)
as Stevens specifies in a letter about his neologism.
The line that follows this term in Stevens’s poem,
‘‘In which he is and as and is are one,’’ enacts
tournamonde revolutions with its smooth shifts
of vowel. It also shows the possibilities of such
shifts: a movement between ‘‘is and as,’’ actual
and imagined, as steadily recurrent as the rotations
of the earth. Stevens values a ‘‘physical world,’’ as
‘‘Esthe ́tique du Mal’’ explains, where ‘‘desire’’ will
never become ‘‘despair’’ (286), and a repetitive
physical world allows such assurance.
Stevens knows that he shares this world with
all of his fellow humans; a quotidian order
joins his poems and his days to the general day-
and-night pattern of earthly existence. His ordi-
nary poetics therefore grounds his first-person
plural—the ‘‘we’’ (350) that emerges through the
repetitions in ‘‘Notes,’’ for example. The pronoun
points to another Deweyan vision, the dream of a
social realm that can nurture rather than sup-
press individualism. Stevens’s engagement with
that philosophical goal, however, again relies on
a poetic method: on his employment of a repeti-
tive order that can unite humdrum life and artis-
tic creativity.
Stevens discovers this crucial unity through
and with his discovery of a public voice, for it is in
an early passage of confident first-person plural,
the conclusion of ‘‘The Man with the Blue Gui-
tar,’’ that the poet of ‘‘The Comedian’’ becomes
the poet of ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.’’
This 1936 work would speak to a ‘‘generation’’
(150), the same generation that tells him, ‘‘Do not
speak to us of the greatness of poetry’’ (136). He
speaks instead of the commonness of poetry—
and the poetry in common life. The final canto
confronts the threat and finds the pleasure in that
ordinary existence, beginning with the everyday
workweek:
That generation’s dream, aviled
In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light,
That’s it, the only dream they knew,
Time in its final block, not time
To come, a wrangling of two dreams.
Here is the bread of time to come,
Here is its actual stone. The bread
Will be our bread, the stone will be
Our bed and we shall sleep by night.
We shall forget by day, except
The moments when we choose to play
The imagined pine, the imagined jay.
(150–51)
As this canto demonstrates, Stevens’s public
address relies on the most seemingly private of
activities: dreaming. Here the difference between
a quotidian of avilement and a quotidian of con-
tentment is the distinction between two different
kinds of dreams. The first is a single conception, the
dreamer imagining only an absolute ‘‘Time in its
final block’’ and thus seeing only degradation in the
‘‘dirty light’’ of an everyday pattern. The second is a
binary wrangling that constitutes a continuous
‘‘time to come’’ and seems to inhabit an everyday
pattern. The ‘‘two dreams’’ of this second sort of
time, that is, could be compared to the two dreams
of ‘‘Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,’’ which
names them as ‘‘night and day’’ (71); and the
‘‘stone’’ of its practice revises an earlier section of
‘‘TheManwiththeBlueGuitar,’’where‘‘Theearth
is not earth but a stone’’ (142). When Stevens advo-
cates this second time, ‘‘time to come,’’ in the final
four stanzas, he presents an everyday order of
slumber and waking that takes its rhythms from
earthly repetitions. If his generation lives and
dreams by this daily bread, the muddy light of
actuality will not ‘‘avile’’ the illusions of darkness.
Rather, reality will repeat one’s dreams; one can, asOf Modern Poetry