one’s present setting and of any possible immi-
nence. The scene realizes the project of a poem as
early as ‘‘Sunday Morning,’’ where Stevens first
wrote that we see in death that inevitable ‘‘fulfil-
ment to our dreams / And our desires,’’ our
‘‘earthly mothers’’ (55). He had long known that
inhuman, earthly matter could provide human
meaning. ‘‘It is the earth itself that is humanity’’
(388), he writes in ‘‘World Without Peculiarity.’’
The conscious abandonment of peculiarity in
‘‘Auroras’’ shows how this can be so—and how
the result is neither vague panpsychism nor pure
materialism but a durable post-theological basis
for identity. In ‘‘Auroras,’’ Stevens’s accession to
impersonal fate discoversa personal history; his
accord with the future findsa restorative repetition
of the past; his acceptance of transience grants the
confirmation of a return.
Like all Stevens’s worldly returns, this fateful
tomorrow is neither absolute replication nor
absolute flux, neither the ‘‘volume of the past,’’
we might say, nor ‘‘fleeting thing[s].’’ These last
phrases come from Kierkegaard’s Repetition
(133), a work that ventures the same sort of para-
dox and the same sort of possibility as does
Stevens’s poem. Like Stevens, Kierkegaard looks
to repetition, the ‘‘actuality and earnestness of
existence,’’ as the solution to dualistic anxiety,
and like Stevens, Kierkegaard defines such prac-
tice in contrast to recollection; his repetition would
replace living backward, inself-serving allegiance
to what has been, with living forward, in selfless
trust in what will come. Only this relinquishment
grants one a past and a self, Kierkegaard explains,
in the continuous movement of a faith that, resign-
ing everything, gains everything again (40–43).
Stevens’s own faith in existence has none of the
Christian theology that marks Kierkegaard’s
belief. Yet we can see in Stevens’s strenuous affir-
mation of an existential ‘‘predicate’’ (Collected
361)—his trust in whatever unfolds from the bare
‘‘it is, it is’’—the expectant futurity that for Kierke-
gaard defines religious conviction. The result is a
very Kierkegaardian return, reversing the normal
economy of memory and expectation to allow for
a better instance of the identity as well as the
innocence that these can provide. In Stevens’s
sense of repetition as in Kierkegaard’s, one gains
what one has been—and what one has desired,
imagined, willed—through affirming what one
will be.
This comparison not only helps to clarify the
stakes of Stevens’s everyday repetition but also
reveals how everyday repetition differentiates his
work from more commonly evoked philosophical
paradigms. Nietzsche, most importantly, asserts
as strongly as Kierkegaard and Stevens that
humans must ‘‘become who we are’’ (Gay 189),
and many scholars have shown how Stevens’s
innocence shares much with Nietzsche’s. Nietz-
sche affirms his through a love of fate similar to
Stevens’s, and the physical immortality that his
amor faticlaims is an extremity of recurrence
that he names the ‘‘eternal return’’ (Zarathustra
257). Nietzsche’s repetition, however, ends in a
selflessness almost mystical, an ecstasy from
which Zarathustra sees ‘‘space and time’’ sparkle
‘‘far away’’ (259). Kierkegaard’s, by contrast, takes
up a concrete, individual existence, a practice in
which his hero ‘‘calmly goes his way, happy in
repetition’’ (Fear132). A similar confidence and
calm constitute the achievement of Stevens’s late
work, where awareness of an eternally returning
tomorrow deepens the importance of ordinarily
repetitive days, and the turbulent conclusion of
‘‘The Auroras of Autumn’’ leads to poems of ‘‘A
Quiet Normal Life’’ (Collected443). Many late
letters emphasize the ‘‘round and round and
round’’ (Huntington WAS 372, 18 Nov. 1949) of
that regimen; he tells one correspondent ‘‘we are
well by day and by night’’ (WAS 3811, 5 Oct.
1954) and celebrates to another the ‘‘ease’’ that
comes from ‘‘going to bedandgettingupearly’’
(Letters 826). Stevens even refuses a chair in
poetry at Harvard, in one letter, because he does
not want to forgo ‘‘the routine of the office’’ (853).
As ‘‘Auroras’’ suggests no less than ‘‘An Ordinary
Evening’’ or ‘‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,’’
Stevens’s office routine was already a poetic
appointment; and his commitment to such ‘‘regi-
men,’’ as he explains in a letter written soon after
‘‘Auroras’’ (615), was a ‘‘Seel-ensfriede’’ by which
he could enjoy ‘‘the mere act of being alive.’’ The
poet of that ‘‘personal absurdity,’’ a great modern-
ist writer and successful insurance executive who
walked to work at the Hartford every morning,
seems less a Nietzschean prophet or superman
than a Kierkegaardian knight of faith.
He is also the ‘‘Ruler of Reality’’ (Collected
414) that Stevens imagines in ‘‘An Ordinary Eve-
ning in New Haven,’’ canto 27. Echoing ‘‘Auroras,’’
this slighted section further details the salvation a
poet can find in the ordinary mode of ‘‘An Ordi-
nary Evening.’’ The poem’s final persona here rests
contented besides the ocean of mortality from
‘‘Auroras’’ or the ‘‘fire-feinting sea’’ (285) of neces-
sity from ‘‘Esthe ́tique du Mal.’’ His rule is one moreOf Modern Poetry