Lighting the martyrs of logic with white fire.
His extreme of logic would be ??ogical.
THE MORSE biography provides an excellent sense of Stevens' poetry. He has presented the first really competent and thorough discussion of Stevens' early work, most of which appeared in the Harvard Advocute and which Stevens later said gave him "the creeps" when re-eading them, and he is extremely helpful in tracing the formative influences on Stevens: Pater, Bergson, and especially George Santayana, who was a friend and teacher of Stevens while he was at Harvard. Morse's discussion of Stevens' three plays, with their curious chinoiserie, fanciful staging, and playfully symbolic characters is intelligent and helpful. And his account of the poems that were added, deleted, and emended in the course of the construction of Stevens' first book, Harmonium, is proficient and engaging.
Morse is good when he is making a case, and some of his writing, particularly the last chapter of the book, is stunning. And his collation of the letters, diaries, and journals with the poems provide some striking insights: the actual events which led to "The Emperor of Ice Cream" and "The Ordinary Women," when juxtaposed with the texts, makes for exciting critical handiwork. But what one asks most from the biography-the anecdotes, the psychology, the flesh, the sheer literary gossip which would go a long way toward taking Stevens out of the half-light of his insurance office-is missing. It's not that the tools are unavailable: Erikson's book on Gandhi, Walter Jackson Bate's on Keats. Nancy Milford's on Zelda Fitzgerald, and Harold Bloom's book on Yeats all point toward the enormous possiblities of life studies. Wallace Stevens: Poetry as Life leaves the biographical task simply and sadly undone.
Morse tantalizes with the range of anecdotal material available, but, whether because of his particular critical biases or because of his own selfconsciousness as a scholar, he never delivers. He tells of Stevens' reading one of his poems at a Greenwich Village party in 1914, but instead of reconstructing the event, he catalogues-dryly, unwillingly, briefly-the terse reminiscences of some members of the party. He never devotes satisfactory attention to the relationship between Stevens' and William Carlos Williams. He lets slip that Sevens' wife Elsie frequently did not like his poetry, and then he never mentions her in relation to her husband's work again. Nor does he ever try to sketch in any of the psychological tensions of Stevens' married life. He lets slip that Stevens was fond of candied violets, that the director of the Louvre doubted Stevens' taste in paintings, but such details are ahnost always involuntarily offered. They are pinpoints rather than panoramas.
AND THERE seem to be weaknesses in Morse's treatment of the poetry: he never confronts the idea of the moment of poetic vision, nor Stevens' reticence to deal with love in his work; he fails occasionally to bring passion to his reading (particularly when dealing with "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction"); and his taste-shown also by the pieces which Morse picked for Selected Poems -is occasionally surprising. In fact, many of the critical passages read like chatty bibliography.
Wallace Stevens: Life as Poetry is a poor biography, but it is a fine book on the poet. In fact, with Kermode's Wallace Stevens and J. Hillis Miller's essay in Boets of Reality, it's one of the best books on Stevens around, far and away superior to Helen Vendler's On Exetnded Wings. But there still remains the task of writing the story of the man whose poetic genius is equalled in this century only by Yeals and Eliot. There still remains the man.