Delmore Schwartz on Wallace Stevens, Master of Reality:

"Finally it would be wrong, in thus emphasizing his original genius, not to speak of how traditional his poetry is, how Stevens continues and renews the greatest rhetorical mode in English, the mode of blank verse in which Shakespeare and Milton wrote. Here, from the conclusion of Academic Discourse in Havana is a passage which representative at once of Stevens' eloquence, his possession of poetic tradition, his conception of the poet's role and conviction that poetry may be 'an infinite incantation of ourselves':

... Is the function of the poet here mere sound,
Subtler than the ornatest prophecy,
To stuff the ear? ...
As part of nature, he is part of us.
His rarities are ours: may they be fit
And reconcile us to our selves in those
True reconcilings, dark pacific words ...
Close the cantina. Hood the chandelier.
The Moonlight is not yellow, but a white
That silences the ever-faithful town.
How pale and how possessed a night it is,
How full of exhalation of the sea. ...
All this is older than the oldest hymn,
Has no more meaning than tomorrow's bread
But let the poet on his balcony
Speak and the sleepers in their sleep shall move
Waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors.
This may be benediction, sepulcher,
And epitaph. It may, however, be
An incantation that the moon defines
By mere example opulently clear...


How, reading such passages, which are a multitude, can we fail to understand the poet's triumphant affirmation: 'What more is there to love than I have loved?' and lived? The Hoon--the human alone--which he calls himself in a number of poems became in his recent work Jocundus; his poems became 'the auroras of Autumn'; Peter Quince "at the clavier" became "Professor Eucalyptus," declaring that "the search for reality is as momentous as the search for god," making continual "addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," and once more reporting, in the last poem of his collected volume, on "the thing itself"; a bird's "scrawny cry," in the first morning, is that of a "chorister whose c preceded the choir," it is a part of "the colossal sun's choral rings" and it is truly "a new knowledge of reality": Prince of the realm and of English, majestic voice, sovereign of the mind and of light, master of reality."