Native of Earth: The Growth of Wallace Stevens' "Fresh Spiritual"
by R. D. Ackerman, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Florida, 1971

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....
The rock, for instance, comes together here with man
and his paramour for the first time in Stevens' poetry. [3] It
provides an illustration of Stevens' mythopoeic process. On
the one hand, as an image of earth the rock serves a function
which Stevens' sea and sky imagery cannot fulfill. The
rock-- as well as Stevens' closely related mountain imagery--
is a representation of the alien substantiality of earth
that is important to Stevens' efforts to see the earth in
its essential barrenness. But on the other hand, the

[3] For a detailed discussion of Stevens' rock figure,
see Ralph J. Mills, "Wallace Stevens: The Image of the
Rock," in Wallace Stevens: A Collection of Critical
Essays, pp. 96-110.

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unusual power of such images as the rock cannot simply be
explained in relation to their abstract functions. To say
that the rock image enables Stevens to strip the earth to a
clean bareness is to describe the image as if it functioned
as an idea.. But the unique level or pitch of Stevens'
poetry, which is conspicuously illustrated in the rock
image, cannot be adequately described by reference to
abstract ideas alone. It is to his own experience and to
the immediate act of perception we must turn to understand
the magical power of the rock. Fortunately we have a brief
record of an early response of Stevens to mountainous rock.
On a trip West in 1903 he wrote in his Journal of the
"capital mountains," especially their "mass." He was struck
by the "rock character of mountains above the timber line"
(L, 64). Such records only hint at the way in which his
receptive imagination must have opened throughout his life
to the declarations of phenomena. It is his poetry which
completes the picture by showing how such momentary exper-
iences of physical presence coalesce into powerful presences
of the mind. This central aspect of Stevens' genius can
best be described with reference to the primitive's exper-
ience of the sacred. In view of Stevens' image of and
response to the rock, note the following observation of
Mircea Eliade:

    The hardness, ruggedness, and permanence of matter
    was in itself a hierophany in the religious con-
    sciousness of the primitive. And nothing was more
    direct and autonomous in the completeness of its
    strength, nothing more noble or more awe-inspiring,

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    than a majestic rock, or a boldly-standing block
    of granite. Above all, stone is. [4]

Such descriptions of the primitive's sense of his world pro-
vide both a key for understanding Stevens' own responses and
a parallel for describing the level or pitch of his poetry.

Stevens wrote during this period that Milton "today,
instead of going off on a myth . . . would stick to the
facts. Poetry will always be a phenomenal thing" (L, 300).
. . . .

[4] Patterns, p. 216