Prize Pies

THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN--Wallace Stevens--Knopf ($3).

Is a poet trying to tell you something? Or is he just muttering to himself? On the muddy banks between the clear running stream of communication and the swamp of self-expression squats a swarm of modern poets, patting mud-pies into shape for the admiration of themselves and their playmates. The much larger crowd of regular guys in the swimming hole jeer at these patty-cakers as sissies, but stand a little in awe of them too, seeing how cleverly they mold their incomprehensible mud images.

By definition (he is a business success, therefore he is normal), Wallace Stevens cannot comfortably be classified as just a mud-dauber. As a vice president, presumably he can make perfectly good, understandable sense any time he feels like it. When he writes poetry, however--as he has been doing, after hours, for some 45 years--apparently he feels no compulsion to be lucid; or else he feels that what he wants to say cannot possibly be said clearly. By him, at any rate.

From 8:15 to 4:30 each working day Wallace Stevens sits at a big, uncluttered desk in a comfortable office with a thick russet carpet. As vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., he spends his business hours dealing with fidelity and surety claims. Nobody would take 70-year-old Insuranceman Stevens for a poet, let alone the hard-to-read kind. But, after hours, Stevens is just that.

His reputation in avant-garde literary circles is just as solid as his reputation in business. His latest bouquet from U.S. poetry pundits was this year's Bollingen Prize.* Stevens makes no excuses for his double life. "Poetry," says he, "is my way of making the world palatable. It's a way of making one's experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable." Nor does he make any excuses for his poems' obscurity:

The poem must resist the intelligence Almost successfully.

But an alert or sympathetic reader can see, at times, what he is driving at. He is always puzzling over the same insoluble, kaleidoscopic riddle: "reality" v. "imagination." In the book's last poem, he asks:

. . . Am I not,

Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?

The same question might be asked of Stevens' poems, most of which begin to fade as soon as they are read. But though they resist the memory as well as the intelligence, their delicate, twangy music--as full of surprises as a zither--sometimes delights the ear. Few living poets can be as vivid and as vague, both at once.

* His predecessor: Ezra Pound, now (as then) a mental patient in St. Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, B.C.

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