But in "Of Modern Poetry," written two years before, and later in "Burghers of Petty Death," we find men and women together, more successfully figured as equal representatives of humanity. "Modern Poetry," Stevens says, "has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. / It has to face the men of the time and to meet / The women of the time." In the second poem, written in 1946, Stevens says:

These are the small townsmen of death,

A man and a woman, like two leaves

That keep clinging to a tree,

Before winter freezes and grows black--

His Collected Poems is not the book a reader might expect from the author of these appealing lines about what modern poetry requires:

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time ...

                                    It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

For my example from Stevens I want to skip ahead to a time when the Modernist experiments had been digested, so that an artist might reflect on the entire historical process, distilling the formative years of Modernism into a single abstraction about abstraction. No one lyric quite does that, but, as the criticism it has spawned indicates, Stevens's "Of Modern Poetry" comes as close as we are likely to get to the goal.

The particular to which Stevens refers in "The Course of a Particular" is at once himself and the phenomenon that absorbs his attention: the "cry" of the leaves on a winter day. The course of the poem is a meditation in which Stevens inverts the visionary process through which he comes to a realization of essential unity.

Yes, grim reality, Stevens seems to say in "The Plain Sense of Things": an unhappy people in a happy world, we are bent by "this sadness without a cause." Weighed against his long poems of even the recent past and their large rallyings of the spirit, "The Plain Sense of Things" seems almost to court the sense of being too weak to live up to past victories.

"[Stevens experiences] a relative ease in sailing toward a mystical negativa, or in bringing a playful exercise in negation to a paradoxical conclusion. The labor is in confronting the banal, unornamented, unswept scene. It is not in the visionary fireworks of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" that Stevens takes up the challenge of a depressive reality but in a much shorter poem of the same period. "The Plain Sense of Things," cast as a reflective narrative in the manner of Frost, comes as close to an "existential ordinary" as a Stevens poem will get.

Instead of evoking the plain sense of things by creating a construct, Stevens evokes the outer in "Plain Sense" by imagining not simply the absence of any construct, but the absence of the faculty that creates the constructs. Paradoxically, though, the imagining of the absence of the imagination is itself a powerful expression of the creative activity of the imagination, "the absence of the imagination had / Itself to be imagined" (CP 503). The poem seems to uncover the plain sense of things through a kind of creative anticreativity, the imagination imagining its own absence.

""As You Leave the Room" was apparently completed a year after "On the Way to the Bus" [reprinted in Opus Posthumous, p. 136]. Its first eight or nine lines may have been written as early as 1947, according to the conjecture of Samuel French Morse, editor of Opus Posthumous. But the last seven lines appear to refer specifically to "On the Way to the Bus." Stevens has again been calling his life as poet to account and wondering if it has not all been misspent in pursuit of an illusion.

The ambiguity of the word "still" points to the integrity of Stevens, who does not attempt to hide from anxiety inherent in self-consciousness. A comparison of "First Warmth" and "As You Leave the Room" is revealing here. The first poem says,

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,

As a questioner about reality,

 

A countryman of all the bones of the world?

Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes

 

Part of the major reality, part of

An appreciation of a reality;

 

Stevens' last poems are distinguished by a broad serenity; this one was published in 1954, the year before he died.