Wallace Stevens's Heroic Aesthetic Humanism

Among the most perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens's "philosophical" position--what his mentor, George Santayana, termed a "vital philosophy"--was Stevens's friend Hi Simons's review of the volume Parts of a World in the journal Poetry [Vol. 61, No. 2 (Nov., 1942), pp. 448-452].

Simons opened his review with the following observation:

"Mr. Wallace Stevens is one of the few living poets who have constructed, each of them, a complete world for his imagination to inhabit. Minor men, half-poets, write out of more or less temporary adjustments between their personalities and their environments. Stevens writes from a unique, whole vision of life, that is revealed in Parts of a World."

This constructed world of the imagination is the poet's way of negotiating the ever-present pressures of "reality"--which is, for Stevens, the wild and unreasoning chaos that threatens, at every moment, to bring the beautiful vision of the poet to rack and ruin.

The heroism of the Stevensian poet lies in his courageous acceptance of this, the human predicament: he does not resent "reality" for what it is, nor does he harbor any illusions that, some day, he may tame it. Instead, he learns to ride the unbroken stallion that is life in this world and to discover, in the venture, beauties previously unimagined that may now enrich his imagination further. This heroism ennobles the poet and, as Simons rightly notes, he becomes a symbol for "... a conviction that life must be nobly lived to be worth living." That conviction (or, as Simon styles it, "feeling") "pervades the finest poems of reflection and the most intense lyrics in Parts of a World. It gives its tone to Stevens' humanism, a humanism with an aesthetic instead of a moralistic basis, more yea-saying and better-humored than the humanism of Babbitt and More that went flat, a philosophy whose author can say, 'What more is there to love than I have loved?', an attitude insistently contemporary that yet makes place among contemporary tensions for a conception of noble living and noble imagining."

Volumes have been written about Stevens's poetry, his life, his legal thought and practice, etc. Volumes more will surely be written. But Simons's four page review of Parts of a World caught the drift of Stevens's poetic project even while it was still in progress and distilled it for posterity.

Quite a critical accomplishment: especially in light of the stubborn difficulty of the work of the poet in question.