Parts of a World

“THERE is no such thing as life,” says Wallace Stevens in one of these poems; and in another, “There is no such thing as truth.” Again, he sees no hope that the chaos of living will ever be ended, because the chaos of the nature of man will never be mended. His only certitude is “being without description ” and without doctrine; experience in itself. There is the process we call life, and there is art: —

You arrange, the tiling is posed
Which in nature merely grows.

Springing from this are innumerable problems concerned with the nature of the poser and of the thing posed, the relationship between them, and the relationship of each to the world of external natural objects. Those problems have always haunted Stevens, and from them he fashions the poems in this book, sometimes in patterns of grave formal grace, sometimes in an iridescence of colorful symbols, His intricately subtle mind spins his webs of verbal tracery round and round the central puzzle of reality and illusion, but the result is a poetry so objective and elusive, and so removed from the experience of the average reader, that the majority of the poems remain, as perhaps Mr. Stevens intended that they should, beautifully phrased and cadenced enigmas. E. D.

W. H. C. WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN

J. C. JOHN COURNOS

E. D. ELIZABETH DREW

W. F. WILSON FOLLETT

R. M. G. ROBERT M. GAY

H. H. HUBERT HERRING

W. S. WALLACE STEGNEK

L. W. LANGLON WARNER