‘MAJOR MAN’ REVISED: ‘PAISANT CHRONICLE’ (1945) AND ‘DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE’ (1945)

The year 1945 was pivotal in Stevens' poetic development. Following Parts of a World and ‘Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction’ the poet experienced a re-examination of his own. Those texts had featured an icy world replete with heroic figures and other nominally ‘cold’, crystalline entities. Stevens' embrace of abstraction engaged a new vocabulary characterized by poetic symbols, the nomenclature of his early 1940s aesthetic. Largely advertised by ‘Notes’, ‘major man’, ‘the first idea’, a ‘supreme fiction’, the ‘death of the gods’, the ‘fluent mundo’, even ‘the abstract’ itself became the terms of a specialist idiom. The impulse toward such rhetoric emanated from Ideas of Order, as Stevens desired to overhaul ‘pure poetry’ in a modern age. But the highpoint for creating an abstract language built into the fabric of an increasingly abstract poetic was 1942, and although Stevens continued to write abstractly he would have less use for an explicit vocabulary, as the mature poetry of his final decade indicates.

Stevens carefully jettisons his 1942 idiom in poems written during 1943–45. Whilst the later poetry refers to such terms as ‘reality’ and ‘imagination’, the need for stylized abstract figures occupied Stevens less.