Response

The first instinct with Stevens is to admire the paradox — the absence of imagination must itself be imagined — and then stop, as though the paradox were the poem's destination rather than its engine. The second instinct is to read the poem as elegy for creative power, a late style acknowledging diminishment. Both are clichés. What the retrieved passages let me see instead is that Stevens is working a problem the nineteenth century already knew but framed differently: what happens when the mind arrives at blankness and discovers blankness requires the same apparatus as fullness. Byron gets there by a completely different route. His Prisoner of Chillon reaches a state where "all was blank, and bleak, and gray" — "vacancy absorbing space, / And fixedness — without a place" — and the critical thing is that this is not unconsciousness. It is a sea of "stagnant idleness, / Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless." The prisoner is exquisitely aware of his own nullity. He has to be. Blankness, it turns out, is not the absence of mental activity but a specific and demanding form of it. Stevens's pond is not simply there; it has to be "imagined as an inevitable knowledge." The plain sense of things is not what you get when imagination stops. It is what imagination looks like when it has only itself as subject.

What Hazlitt sees in Wordsworth clarifies the stakes. "He may be said to create his own materials; his thoughts are his real subject. His understanding broods over that which is 'without form and void,' and 'makes it pregnant.'" This is the Wordsworthian version of the same operation — the mind confronting a landscape that offers nothing and producing meaning from the confrontation itself. But Stevens refuses the Wordsworthian resolution. Wordsworth's "Hart-Leap Well" promises that "Nature, in due course of time, once more / Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom." The waste is temporary; nature will replenish what human violence depleted. Stevens's great pond has no such trajectory. The mud, the dirty-glass water, the waste of the lilies — these are not awaiting restoration. They are the thing itself, and the poem's discipline is to hold them without converting them into promise. Where Tennyson's hidden voice whispers that "every cloud, that spreads above / And veileth love, itself is love," Stevens insists that the dirty glass expressing silence is expressing silence. The veil is not love. The veil is a veil.

The pairing I find most productive is between Stevens's "a fantastic effort has failed, a repetition / In a repetitiousness of men and flies" and Eliot's insistence in "The Perfect Critic" that the end of reading is "a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed." Stevens is performing exactly what Eliot prescribes — stripping personal emotion to reach the object as it really is — and what he finds when he gets there is not Eliot's amor intellectualis Dei but a slanting chimney and a rat. The plain sense of things is what pure contemplation actually delivers when you refuse to let the rainbow break from the shower, refuse to let the woods fill so full of song there is no room for sense of wrong. Stevens is the most honest inheritor of the Romantic project precisely because he follows its method to a conclusion the Romantics would not have endorsed. Imagination, turned on its own absence, does not discover hidden hope. It discovers that the pond requires description and that description is, itself, the last imaginative act available. The poem does not mourn this. It does not celebrate it. It requires it, as a necessity requires.