Professor Langdon
Hammer: On Wednesday,
I would like you to come having
read one of Stevens's longer
poems.
It's not too long but it's a
little longer:
"The Auroras of Autumn," which
is a wonderful poem.
 
It's not exactly timely at this
moment but please come having
thought about it.
 
As you read it,
think about images that you
find in the poem of stars,
of the theater,
of mother and father;
the poem is full of both.
A friend asked me the other
day, "Are there any happy
poets?"
Well, of course no,
there really aren't,
or at least not any that are
any good.
No, that's not true.
In fact, as I think about the
syllabus, Williams is a happy
poet.
He calls himself the "happy
genius" of his household in that
little poem, "Danse Russe,"
where he's talking about running
around the house naked.
Marianne Moore,
I think, in many ways is a
happy poet.
But no poet is so happy as
Wallace Stevens.
And Stevens is happy in the
sense that he is a comic poet.
 
And that doesn't mean that
you're going to laugh a lot
while you read Wallace Stevens,
though you might sometimes.
And he can be silly,
though that's perhaps not his
strongest vein.
Stevens is a comic poet in the
sense, in the generic sense of a
poet in whom and for whom and
with whom the world always comes
right.
The world is right and good.
 
It is a regenerative,
exhilarating,
endlessly consoling and
meaningful place to dwell.
And Stevens is,
you know, really as I read him
every year, I like him more and
more, and he becomes more and
more important.
Stevens gives us,
really, a comprehensive view of
the world and one in which
poetry and imagination have
central roles to play.
Imagination:
that's an important word in
Stevens.
It's a word he takes right out
of British romanticism and the
long tradition of romantic
poetry.
And Stevens is,
though in complex ways,
like Hart Crane,
a defiantly romantic modern
poet.
Stevens's poetry,
like Moore's,
like Crane's – to some extent
like Frost's – is always,
in a sense, meta-poetry.
 
That is, well,
he shares with these poets,
as with certain others on our
syllabus,
the sense that poetry has to
always involve an investigation
into its own rules:
how it works,
what it does,
what it's capable of,
what its potential uses are;
and that all these are in a
sense open and available to
re-definition at a fundamental
level.
He says--There's a sort of
wonderful set of adages or
epigrams or statements at the
back of your book which come
from Stevens's "Adagia."
One of those statements is "all
poetry is experimental poetry."
And there's a sense in any
Stevens poem that Stevens is
experimenting and is going in
some new direction,
not just at the beginning of
the poem but throughout the
poem.
That's how it proceeds.
You could compare this idea to
Williams's interest in newness
and a sense of life as "always
subversive of life preceding."
It's a related idea for Stevens.
 
In his poem,
"Of Modern Poetry," which is a
little essay on the subject of
what is modern poetry,
Stevens says,
"It has / to construct a new
stage."
And it not only has to
construct that new stage,
it has to "be on it," too.
And there's a way in which
Stevens's poems are both
creating a new space in which to
speak, and they're speaking from
there.
These two things are going on
at once.
Stevens also says in that set
of "Adagia" – and there are
wonderful, provocative ones
throughout,
"A poem is a pheasant," for one
– he also says,
"Poetry is a means of
redemption."
That's on page 972.
"Poetry is a means of
redemption."
He meant it, he meant it.
 
For Stevens,
poetry stands in the place that
religion once did.
 
Other poets that we've read
this semester look to poetry to
serve different functions of
religion, I think.
Eliot is concerned with ritual
and community and ways in which
poetry might establish these,
constitute these.
Moore is the most,
well, with Eliot,
the most serious Christian;
is concerned with poetry as a
model for ethical action,
as a kind of guide for conduct
in the world.
And poetry models for her what
she calls "love" or "hope" or
striving or "doing hard things."
For Stevens,
poetry takes over another
dimension of religious
experience.
Poetry takes over
Christianity's traditional
concern with redemption,
and with redemption – with
questions about the afterlife,
paradise – the transcendental.
How can culture imagine the
transcendental in a
non-transcendental world?
 
How can it imagine the
metaphysical in a
non-metaphysical world?
 
How can we have Heaven if we
don't have God?
These are all questions in
Stevens's poetry.
He answers them in ways that
put him on Hart Crane's side of
the debate with Eliot.
 
In The Waste Land,
the decay of sacred authority;
this is a crisis of community,
of meaning;
language has lost its meaning.
 
 
 
For Crane, this condition,
rather than a crisis,
is an opportunity,
an opportunity for poetry to
"lend a myth to God."
 
Eliot is disturbed to see God
as something constructed,
something linguistic,
something we might lend a myth
to;
only lend it,
in the sense that we're going
to have to get it back.
For Crane, for Stevens,
God always was a myth,
a metaphor, and metaphors can
and need to be exchanged and
renewed all the time.
 
In this, Crane and Stevens are
very close together.
 
 
Let's look at an early poem of
Wallace Stevens's,
an early grand poem called
"Sunday Morning," the first one
in your Stevens's selection.
 
It's on page 237.
 
 
 
"Sunday Morning" was published
in Poetry magazine in
1915, which is to say,
it's contemporary with
Prufrock, roughly contemporary
with Marianne Moore's "A Grave";
both poems that appeared in
Poetry,
too.
Let's read this first stanza.
Complacencies of the
peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny
chair,
And the green freedom of a
cockatoo
Upon a rug [all these things]
mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient
sacrifice.
She dreams a little,
and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old
catastrophe, ["that old
catastrophe" being the
crucifixion]
As a calm darkens among
water-lights.
[Or if it's not the
crucifixion, it's the Fall.]
The pungent oranges and bright,
green wings
Seem things in some procession
of the dead,
Winding across wide water,
without sound.
The day is like wide water,
without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her
dreaming feet
Over the seas,
to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and
sepulchre.
This is a poem about not going
to church, about doing something
else with Sunday morning.
 
It announces or it takes for
granted really a great change in
culture, a change in the
cultural order where Sunday
morning is no longer spent,
or need not necessarily always
be spent, at church.
 
Stevens is writing about,
in some ways,
the end of the Christian Era.
 
Of course, it's gone on but in
a different form from what it
had been.
You could think about how
little this poem is like a poem
on a similar theme in Yeats,
such as "The Second Coming,"
where the end of Christianity is
an apocalyptic event and there's
some "rough beast" "slouching
towards Bethlehem."
 
Instead, in Stevens the power
of the past, the Christian Era,
simply dissipates – poof!
 
– dissolves in the
circumstances that he's
describing.
What is a peignoir?
I think Stevens likes the
French word.
This is a dressing gown.
 
We have a female figure here
presented to us in a space of
domestic bourgeois luxury,
with comfort and complacency
even, with coffee and oranges,
and a cockatoo.
Whether that cockatoo is
actually a bird or a design in
the rug, critics have disagreed;
you can make that bird what you
like.
This female presence that we're
introduced to is a figure for
the poet, an unnamed "she" that
the poem will be about.
 
She, embodying poetic
sensibility, poetic thinking and
poetic impulses,
seems to place poetry in this
space of domestic comfort,
seems to identify poetry with
the feminine,
with a female perspective,
and with consumption,
with fine imported goods,
as you will find elsewhere in
Stevens.
She identifies a life of ease
with the imagination.
Stevens's poetry,
like Yeats's in certain ways,
though on very different terms,
or even like Eliot's,
presents us with a number of
very powerful female figures
with whom the poet identifies
his own creativity.
This is an important one.
 
And there's an aspect of
Stevens that's gendered as
feminine, you could say.
 
It's that aspect of Stevens
that identifies with poetry as a
space apart from the masculine
world of work.
Contrast this with Frost who
identifies poetry with
subjective freedom,
a space apart from objective
necessity, what Frost is always
responding to.
Stevens maintains a complex
attitude, however,
towards this identification of
poetry with aspects of culture
that are gendered as female.
 
There's a macho strain in
Stevens too, often a hyperbolic
and somewhat comic one in which
Stevens is identifying with
giants, big men.
And I'll talk more about that
two lectures from now.
 
In this poem,
I think, well,
possibly warding off the
anxiety of identifying poetry so
clearly and strongly with the
female,
Stevens includes in stanza
seven, on pages 239 to 240,
a kind of parodic celebration
of masculinity:
Supple and turbulent,
a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer
morn
Their boisterous devotion to
the sun,
Not as a god,
but as a god might be,
Naked among them,
like a savage source.
And so on.
This is another vein of
Stevens's imagination and it's
here in this poem in,
again, almost hyperbolic comic
form.
If Stevens is anxious about
identifying poetry with the
feminine, I think that's
because,
in a sense, as Stevens sets
things up here at this early
point in his career,
all poets are women poets on
Sunday morning.
Poetry can only be written on
Sunday morning or on the weekend
or after hours,
at the end of the workday.
 
These are the spaces in which
in his life poetry exists,
but more generally these are
the sort of cultural spaces,
the times, that Stevens
identifies poetry with.
Here in this poem,
Stevens is brooding on the
bourgeois image of the earthly
paradise;
that is, what it's like to have
a nice home and some free time
in it.
It's a poem that Stevens wrote
in his twenties,
in the earliest phase of his
career.
Like Eliot, like Frost,
Stevens went to Harvard.
 
All these modern poets went to
Harvard.
He was from early on divided in
his ambitions between poetry and
the law, a securely masculine
pursuit.
Stevens tried journalism
briefly in New York and a legal
practice before eventually he
entered the Hartford Accident
and Indemnity Company in our
state,
where he remained for the rest
of his life, becoming a national
authority on surety bonds and
leading an extraordinary divided
life: a life in which poetry was
identified with leisure and
repose.
There's a kind of sybaritic
quality to Stevens's
imagination.
He luxuriates.
In another one of those
"Adagia" he says,
"A poem is a café."
And so it is, in Stevens's case.
 
Poetry represents a kind of
release from objective
disciplines, including the
nineteenth-century Protestant
injunctions to refuse private
pleasures,
to save for a future life,
perhaps a life beyond life,
an afterlife.
This is the "Puritanism" that
Crane objects to early in his
career and fights against.
And Stevens,
too, is here in a more cautious
way struggling against it.
 
On page 238,
in the second stanza of this
poem, he says,
"Why should she give her bounty
to the dead?"
Why should she give her spirit,
her imaginative investments,
her hopes to the dead?
Here, suggesting both the dead
Jesus and also a future life
beyond life that Christianity
would look towards.
Stevens is imagining earth
itself as where bounty is given
and where it should be bestowed.
 
It's where we are.
 
And he'll go on and describe it
in this stanza:
What is divinity if it
can come
Only in silent shadows and in
dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts
of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright,
green wings,
or else
In any balm or beauty of the
earth,
Things to be cherished like the
thought of heaven?
 
[No, divinity can't be off
somewhere else.
It can't be beyond life.]
Divinity must live within
herself: [And what form does it
take there?]
Passions of rain,
or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness,
or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms;
gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn
nights;
All pleasures and all pains,
remembering
The bough of summer and the
winter branch.
These are the measures destined
for her soul.
Here, divinity must live within
the person in her subjectivity,
a subjectivity that's modeled
on and represented as a version
of the sensual encounter with
the seasons,
which are themselves revolving
and balanced and cyclical:
"the bough of summer and the
winter branch."
To say that paradise must be
here on earth is also to say
that it must include death and
dying,
a world of change,
a world that's always,
in a sense, passing out of
existence.
And Stevens says in stanza
five:
… "But in contentment
[she says, he says with her]
I still feel
The need of some imperishable
bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty;
hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment
to our dreams
And our desires.
Yes.
Paradise, if it is to exist on
earth, must include death in it.
 
And as the poem moves towards
its close, that's what Stevens
imagines for us.
It's also, well,
it's a scene that he leaves us
with in the eighth stanza.
It's a scene of a world of
plenty, a beautiful world but
also a world which,
for these reasons,
includes death in it.
 
Let's look at that.
 
It returns to the opening lines
of the poem, and then the camera
pans out to give a view of the
landscape and the world around
us:
She hears,
upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries,
"The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits
lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus,
where he lay."
The tomb is empty.
Jesus is not a presence for us.
 
And now Stevens moves for the
first time in the poem out of
that third person,
"she," to speak in the first
person plural.
We live in an old chaos
of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and
night,
Or island solitude,
unsponsored,
free,
Of that wide water,
inescapable.
"We live in an old chaos of the
sun": we live in a world that is
material.
It exists as a set of rocks,
blasted across the universe,
that the sun structures and
radiates.
Even as Stevens makes this
declaration, characteristic of
him is the resistance to
residing in any one formulation.
 
So, he'll say one thing and
then he'll say another,
"or," and notice this pattern
here where he,
in fact, gives us two "or"s.
 
"Old dependency of day and
night": That's another way of
imaging our world where day and
night,
these essential contraries,
these essential natural forms,
are dependent on each other,
are constituting each other
continuously.
We are dependent on them;
they are dependent on each
other.
We exist "or" – perhaps –
in "island solitude."
Here the world,
the globe, this natural space,
this earthly paradise,
is an island,
and a solitary one,
one without God out there,
in a condition Stevens will
call "unsponsored" and therefore
free.
"Of that wide water,
inescapable," where that wide
water that was first introduced
to us in the first stanza of the
poem,
becomes a kind of image for a
silence in the world,
which is the silence of a lack
of,
I think, divine language.
 
From these generalizations,
Stevens then moves to these
particulars:
Deer walk upon our
mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their
spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the
wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the
sky,
At evening, casual flocks of
pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they
sink,
Downward to darkness,
on extended wings.
Stevens's approach,
finally, is not to generalize
about the world but to describe
it;
to not tell us how things
should be or might be or were,
but rather how they are;
how they are now and at this
moment.
Stevens evokes the world in a
state of fullness,
of ripeness.
Those berries are ripening,
there're deer walking on the
mountains.
That present tense that he's
using evokes action that is
ongoing, is present.
 
And yet all these essential
satisfactions that he evokes are
colored by evening.
 
Pleasure here is shadowed by
death, not unhappily,
but it is the color of the
environment, of the evening.
The birds, they make a downward
movement, and yet their wings
are extended.
Their undulations are ambiguous
in that sense,
much as the "dependency of day
and night" is itself ambiguous.
 
You could contrast those birds
with Hart Crane's ascending
seagull at the beginning of "The
Bridge."
This is a different image.
 
Stevens is here trying to image
for us a non-transcendental,
secular vision of the world.
 
Let's look ahead to another
poem, "The Poems of Our Climate"
on page 252, another poem
exploring the idea of paradise.
 
 
Stevens means here in that
title, "The Poems of Our
Climate," America,
our culture,
our environment,
our situation.
It's a poem that you might read
alongside a poem like "England"
by Marianne Moore.
 
He also means the poems of our
time or our moment.
And our time or our moment for
Stevens is defined as a climate,
as a kind of environment rather
than some other kind of
overarching way of understanding
or defining the present moment.
It's not, as the poem unfolds,
a question about nature so much
as about culture.
 
Stevens will here explore one
of his recurrent impulses;
that is, to renew poetry by
simplifying terms,
by getting down to some
essentials, some primary
elements.
If Stevens is a sensualist,
he's also a kind of ascetic.
 
He can be both and even finds,
I suppose, a kind of sensual
asceticism, and this poem
exemplifies that.
Clear water in a
brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations.
 
The light
In the room more like a snowy
air,
Reflecting snow.
A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when
afternoons return.
 
[We still don't have a main
verb yet.]
Pink and white carnations--one
desires
So much more than that.
 
The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain,
low and round,
With nothing more than the
carnations there.
This is Stevens exploring
another version of secularity,
of the secular,
giving us a poetry it seems,
as he starts,
not of ideas but of things,
as Williams might approve.
 
It is a world of white.
 
You can understand the impulse
here as a version of the
reduction to nakedness or the
reduction to primary terms that
Imagism seeks to accomplish.
 
And these are,
in a sense, precisely images
that Stevens is presenting to
us,
almost as a kind of still-life
there: that clear water in a
brilliant bowl and the pink and
white carnations,
where that word "carnation" –
from the Latin,
meaning flesh – evokes the
colors of the body and of blood
and of flesh,
and yet those qualities are
here held in a kind of
suspension that contains them
and treats them coolly and
arranges them and it's
unsatisfying to Stevens.
 
The moment he has created this
still life, he starts to want to
get rid of it.
He says:
Say even that this
complete simplicity [that I've
just produced here]
Stripped one [in fact,
of the heat,
of the flesh]
of all one's torments,
concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made if fresh in a world of
white,
A world of clear water,
brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more,
one would need more,
More than a world of white and
snowy scents.
And again, this is
characteristic of Stevens and
his imagination.
If he said one thing,
he will now try something else.
He will now turn his strategy
in another direction.
He continues here affirming
powers of mind:
There would still remain
the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to
escape, come back
To what had been so long
composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
 
Note that, in this bitterness,
delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot
in us,
Lies in flawed words and
stubborn sounds.
The "never-resting mind" always
wants more.
Even as it wants to get down to
primary terms,
it then wants more again.
 
Paradise is "the imperfect,"
"the imperfect" meaning,
again, Stevens is always
playing on Latin,
I think;
the imperfect is the
incompleted, the not finished,
the ongoing.
And, too, there are tinges in
that word "imperfect" of
corruption, of fallenness,
of flaws, as Stevens will go on
to say.
The imperfect is something
that's not cold but "hot," as
people are hot,
hot with desire.
It's the heat of desire that
shows itself,
as Stevens says,
in "flawed words and stubborn
sounds."
Stevens affirms the
"never-resting mind" but above
all he affirms a kind of
continuing impulse and demand to
speak,
to find "flawed words and
stubborn sounds."
 
Over the course of the poem,
Stevens moves from a still
world to a world in action,
and he moves from a world
that's visual to a world that is
verbal, that's linguistic.
Here and elsewhere in Stevens,
language is the privileged
medium of human desire and
aspiration.
It's what gives us "delight,"
his word here;
it gives us pleasure,
and in this sense it remains
– language does – on the
side of leisure and of play
rather than of discipline and
work.
And yet, also note the
implications of those
adjectives.
"Flawed": "flawed" implies
craft, some kind of making,
I think.
And "stubborn":
"stubborn" suggests
perseverance,
discipline;
perhaps surprisingly,
a kind of continuing will to,
well, not to rest and to go on
speaking.
These values that emerge in
this poem are,
well, recurrent in Stevens.
 
You'll find him exploring them,
celebrating them elsewhere.
Let's go forward to the poem
called "The Man on the Dump," on
page 254, for another poem,
again, exploring and affirming
certain capacities of language.
 
This is Stevens at play in the
landscape of The Waste
Land, if you like.
 
Stevens in a letter explains
that on his way to work – he
walked to work from West
Hartford to downtown – he
would observe,
during the Depression,
a man on the dump and composed
this poem prompted by him.
Day creeps down.
 
The moon is creeping up.
 
The sun is a corbeil of flowers
the moon
Blanche [of course she's
Blanche, it's the white moon]
Places there, a bouquet.
 
Ho-ho… The dump is full
Of images [just like The
Waste Land].
 
Days pass like papers from a
press.
The bouquets come here in the
papers.
So the sun,
And so the moon,
both come, and the janitor's
poems
Of every day,
the wrapper on the can of
pears,
The cat in the paper-bag,
the corset, the box
From Estonia:
the tiger chest,
for tea.
If Stevens celebrates desire,
celebrates consumption and
sensual pleasure,
as he does, well,
that makes a certain amount of
garbage.
That makes a certain amount of
waste.
If you are constantly seeking
new ways of phrasing and
understanding the world,
you're going to have to be
getting rid of the ones you just
had, the ones that you were just
using.
And the dump is an image of
this, which Stevens confronts
here with a certain kind of
irritation, playful but not so
far, I think,
from despair.
The dump is a place of old
poetry, and, of course,
Stevens's own poetry doesn't
want to end up there.
 
Or maybe it does,
since Stevens is able to find
in the dump a certain kind of
regenerative power:
The freshness of night
[any poet knows]
has been fresh a long time.
 
The freshness of morning,
the blowing of day,
one says
That it puffs as Cornelius
Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it
puffs like this or that.
Maybe it's just all air,
these poems.
Stevens is talking about the
problem of cliché.
 
He's talking about,
well, the way in which any
formulation dies,
becomes frozen,
becomes a bouquet you must
throw out.
This is a condition in The
Waste Land that Eliot
profoundly mistrusts.
 
Stevens, on the other hand,
sees in it a potential for a
vision of the self that is
consoling and is powerful.
Stevens generates,
as the poem goes on,
an image of the poet as a man
on the dump,
one who "beats an old tin can"
and makes stubborn sounds,
which are, if you like,
sounds of his own stubbornness.
Stevens is willing,
as Eliot is not,
to make belief be a personal
thing, to be something that each
of us constructs out of our own
will and our own powers of
speech.
As the poem develops,
Stevens goes through a kind of
a gesture of throwing things
out;
a kind of reduction to primary
terms that is like "The Poems of
Our Climate," as around line 21
or so he says:
Now in the time of spring
(azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums,
daffodils, blue phlox) [you
know all the names],
Between that disgust and this
[and I think there is disgust in
the poem],
between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas
and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas
and so on),
One feels the purifying change.
 
One rejects
The trash.
And as one rejects the trash,
as one gets down to some kind
of primary whiteness,
some kind of fresh seeing of
the world, we then start to see
the moon in perhaps different
terms,
not merely as "Blanche," some
old lady from poems from the
past, but perhaps in some new
terms.
Stevens says:
That's the moment when
the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons.
 
That's the time
One looks at the
elephant-colorings of tires
[even this ugliness is
interesting].
Everything is shed;
the moon comes up then as the
moon
(All its images are in the
dump) [you have to see it
freshly]
and you see
[because you're seeing freshly
now]
As a man (not like an image of
a man),
You see the moon rise in the
empty sky.
One sits and beats an old tin
can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that
which one believes.
That's what one wants to get
near.
Could it after all
Be merely oneself…
That you want to get near,
that you need to get near?
Stevens is willing to say yes,
whereas Eliot is,
as I say, frightened of this
prospect.
… as superior as the ear
To a crow's voice?
Did the nightingale torture the
ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the
mind?
And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds?
Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher's
honeymoon, one finds
On the dump?
Is it to sit among the
mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots,
shoes and grass and murmur
aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of
grackles and say
Invisible priest;
is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry
stanza my stone?
 
Where was it one first heard of
the truth?
The the.
It's a wonderful poem that's on
the verge of nonsense,
that's on the verge of a kind
of personal language that,
as I say, is an apocalyptic
thing in The Waste Land
but is here a source of energy
and power and play for Stevens.
 
Stevens is not afraid of
nonsense, he's not afraid of
idiosyncrasy of expression.
 
He is willing to play with
words.
Linguistic play puts Stevens in
touch with a kind of primal
poetic resource.
Stevens understands truth as
something that is linguistic;
it's something constructed in
and through language.
 
It is therefore perishable.
 
It is also for the same reason
renewable.
Look at that last line.
 
"Where was it one first heard
of the truth?
The the."
"The the," if you prefer.
That last sentence fragment,
"The the," what is that?
Is that an answer or a
clarification to the question,
"Where was it one first heard
of the truth?"
In other words,
where did this idea of truth
come from to begin with?
 
Where did you get that idea?
 
Why do you want it?
 
You want it because it is
something that you have heard
about;
it is something that has been
spoken of.
It has come to us as language
has framed it.
"The the": the definite article.
It's the definite article that
makes the truth the truth.
Otherwise, it would be merely
only what?
A truth.
That is, to indicate and
declare truth in its
singularity, to give it this
status – that is a linguistic
act.
The truth is the function,
as Stevens understands it,
of a certain linguistic
capacity: in this case a verbal
formula which takes priority
ultimately over any specific
content or doctrine,
any truth.
In that sense,
the truth lies in "The the."
"The the" is here
representative of the human
capacity for declaration,
for statement,
a specifically verbal and
linguistic power.
The truth that it represents is
not in any sense a final term,
a last word,
a doctrine, a particular
content of any kind.
 
Instead, it points to a way of
thinking, a medium of thought,
a medium of thought and desire,
a process which is a process of
naming or, as Stevens would also
call it in "Of Modern Poetry",
an "act of finding."
 
This is what language does in
Stevens.
It creates the world;
it finds the world;
it constructs the world through
such elementary terms as the
definite article.
 
Well, we'll hear more about the
implications of this perspective
on experience next time and
following.
