Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 23 Fall 2005

              The Life of the Spirit
in Santayana, Stevens, and Williams
Then Oxymandias said the spouse, the bride
Is never naked. A fictive covering
Weaves always glistening from the heart and mind l.
Joel Porte's paper on Stevens and Williams contains a subtly articulated
philosophic core. It reviews the reputed Imagiste/Symboliste divide between
Williams and Stevens in the light of what I will call Santayana's double sense of
the functioning of essences in human consciousness. His argument is that, pace
Williams' ostensibly "objectivist" poetics, his actual poetic performances are topoi of
the imagination, and therefore are on the same page with Stevens' pronouncements on
poetry's "world of words [as] the life of the world" (cp 474) which involve
suspensions of belief In the ordinarily encountered "things" of the empirical world.
This commonly shared insistence on an aesthetic dimension of experience Porte
astutely relates to Santayana's realm of essences as intuited by the pure spirit.
I will add that Santayana's sense of the double functioning of essences appears to
require an appreciation of the kind of exemplary expression of the magic of fresh
perception, combined with blooded, personal affection, in the poetry of Stevens and
Williams. Stevens and Williams were twentieth-century Emersonian "modernists" in
their quest for originality and integrity of expression in their own bloody times. They
bear witness to Santayana's formulation in rb: "Integrity ... the clear allegiance of a
transparent soul to its radical will, without being true of anything external, makes a
man's choices true to himself (rb 475). Or in Stevens' words just cited from "Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction," "The bride / Is never naked. A fictive covering / Weaves
always glistening from the heart and mind." Implicit in such formulations there is the
further Emersonian implication that the poets are our "representative men" —that is,
they speak the vatic lines which restore our alienated majesty in pleasures of thought
and moral sentiment in the ever-widening circles of our human lives.
In such wise, Santayana tells us, the poets and artists, who are the most
representative humanists among us, speak of moral truths in their own ways. They
relieve our care-driven animal anxieties as they bring us to hitherto unimagined
freshness, clairvoyance, and radiance of insight in the life of the spirit.
Santayana's basic formulation that "knowledge is faith mediated by symbols"
parses into two kinds of faith or belief—in "pragmatic" life and in the "artifices" of the
spirit. These are issues and resolutions of universal philosophic import. Placed in
their historical milieu, I venture to submit, they focus the implication that Santayana's
ontologicai categories can be seen as having not only reconfigured the teachings of
American pragmatism on a more realistic or naturalistic basis, but also as having
1 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1990),
p, 396; hereafter cited as CP. Citations will also come from The Letters of Wallace, ed. Holly
Stevens (University of California Press, 1996), hereafter cited as L; and Wallace Stevens, Opus
Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, ed. Milton J. Bates (Vintage Books, 1990), hereafter cited as
OP.
This paper was read to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in Boston on December 29,
2004. An enhanced version of this paper will be posted on the Bulletin website, with an added
note on Santayana and more complete footnotes.