M.H. Abrams, whose Natural Supernaturalism illuminated Romantic poetry for generations of literature students, has died at the amazing age of 102.
Here’s a passage UD has always liked, linking Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens:
[The] Romantic endeavor to salvage traditional experience and values by accommodating them to premises tenable to a later age has continued to be a prime concern of post-Romantic poets. Stevens expressly identified the aim “of modern poetry” as the attempt to convert the setting and agents and language of Scripture into
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
Among modern poets none stays so close to some of Wordsworth’s formulations as Stevens does…
Shall she not find, he enquires about his protagonist in “Sunday Morning,”
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself…
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?…
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
Stevens represents the musing in solitude of a modern woman as she savors the luxuries of her Sunday breakfast in a brilliant un-Wordsworthian setting of sun, rug, coffee and oranges, and a green cockatoo. In these subdued lines, however, we recognize something approximating the high argument of the Romantic poet who (while “Beauty – a living Presence of the earth” waited upon his steps) proclaimed the power of the mind of man to realize an equivalent of “Paradise, and groves / Elysian, Fortunate Fields,” by the “consummation” of a union with the common earth which will require of us “nothing more than what we are.”