Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 23 Fall 2005

              Artifices of Eternity:
The Ideal and the Real in
Stevens, Williams and Santayana
The ontologicai status of the poem; Its dependence on what we think of as, or
call, the "real"; its relation to "ideas" or the "ideal": these are the perennial
questions we ask when thinking of poetry and, perhaps, of art in general.1
Though Aristotle, as we know, was inclined to view poetry as more serious and
more philosophical than history because it deals in universals rather than in particulars,
modern criticism tends to be skeptical about such a confident binary. History, which
Emerson calls "a fable agreed upon," and poetry, which turns experience into
discourse, have come more and more to look alike. And the relationship of both to the
brute particulars of life as we live it has long since appeared too problematic to admit
of simplistic distinctions. It may seem paradigmatic to us that a poem can take the
place of a mountain (Stevens) or of some plums (Williams); we certainly understand
Dickinson when she claims that the sunset she embodies in a poem is more convenient
than the real thing. And yet in the intricate debates that constitute modern criticism we
perpetually worry these issues.
Are some kinds of poetry closer to the "real" than other kinds — more objective
and less subjective, built on the direct transcription of "images" rather than the shifting
sands of personal "symbols"? Are there really no "ideas but in things," as Williams
claims? Is a poem best conceived of as a "machine made of words," empowered by the
imagination ("an actual force comparable to electricity or steam") to raise us "to some
approximate co-extension with the universe"? Are we "moved" by the agency of this
force to bring a new form to birth ("the contraction which is felt")? Is the imagination
not only essentially of its time ("the ability to record at the moment when the
consciousness is enlarged") but also a kind of torquing energy that gives us "a
momentum toward life" ("imagination is not to avoid reality, nor is it description nor
an evocation of objects or situations, It is to say that poetry does not tamper with the
world but moves it")? Do we agree with Williams when he suggests that the modern
poem is a made object that provides a kind of technology of the "truth"? Or, to use
Yeats's language, is poetry an "artifice of eternity"— a discourse that transports us to a
transcendent realm? Is it, as Stevens claims, finally, a "transcendent analogue"?
These initial reflections are prompted by my rereading of Albert Gelpfs incisive
chapter on Stevens and Williams in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism
(Cambridge, 1985). While allowing for the "common allegiance of both poets to
Modernism" (and Gelpi insists this Includes — problematically, I think — a belief in
both Stevens and Williams that the poet is "Anti-idealist and antimystical"), Gelpi
nevertheless ranges the two on different sides of the Imagiste/Symboliste divide: "the
underlying and defining inclination of the Imaglst imagination ... is to fix the mind and
its language on the phenomena of experience; the corresponding inclination of the
Symboliste imagination is to dissolve sense impressions into linguistic evocations of
psychic states." My intent in this paper is to put pressure on the concepts and terms
1 This paper was read by Angus Kerr-Lawson to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting m
Boston on December 29,2004.