The father of Studs
Finn, James
what Jean Paul Sartre has called a "stem optimism." There is a sense (or, at minimum, a desire) of union in Roethke; contrariwise, aloneness in Stevens. Stevens accepted that chasm between self...
...What Stevens once wrote of his old Hatvard mentor, George Santayana, can justly be applied to Stevens himself: "Total grandeur of a total edifice,/Chosen by an inquisitor of structures/For Himself...
...Commonweal: 622...
...He stops upon this threshold,/As if the design of all his words takes form/And frame from thinking and is realized" ("To An Old Philosopher in Rome...
...That was his self-appointed poetic task...
...It is a noble undertaking...
...Stevens accepted that chasm between self and the world but labored all of his poetic life to bridge it...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
