‘The strange unlike’: Stevens’ Poetics of Resemblance

Abstract

He gripped more closely the essential prose

As being, in a world so falsified,

The one integrity for him, the one

Discovery still possible to make,

To which all poems were incident, unless

That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last.

(CPP 29)

Concluding the third of the six sections that make up ‘The Comedian as the Letter C’, these lines parody the metaphysical aspirations of Crispin, its questing protagonist, as he inhales ‘the rancid rosin, burly smells … and all the arrant stinks’ emanating from the warehouses lining the Carolina riverbank. These stinks become the sign and seal of Crispin’s ‘rude aesthetic’, in which the authenticity of an essential prose is set against the falsifications of poetry. Yet the final line undermines this pious opposition. Crispin’s ongoing search for the ‘veritable ding an sich … free / From the unavoidable shadow of himself’ (CPP 23–4), repeatedly runs up against its own impossibility. If poetry is ‘incidental’, a distorting shadow cast by the subject over its object, it is also the Ding an sich’s necessary guise. Paradoxically, prose can manifest itself only in the guise of a poem.