?Pure Rhetoric of a Language Without Words?: Stevens's Musical Creation of Belief in ?Credences of Summer?

Abstract

JL rom his earliest his later poems, Stevens longs for respite from ever-moving world and feel at one with world about him. In The Man Whose Pharynx was Bad, his speaker decries time's motion and wishes that summer would come rest lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed / Through days like oceans in obsidian1 (stanza iii, lines 3-4). In This Solitude of Cataracts, he longs to feel same over and over, for the river go on flowing same way (11. 8-9). To feel even a momentary release from flux would be enough, cries speaker of The Ultimate Poem is Abstract: It would be enough / If we were ever, just once, at middle, fixed / In this Beautiful World of Ours and not as now, / Helplessly at edge (11. 16-19). While in many poems Stevens expresses despair at relentless change of world, in Cre? dences of Summer he creates a poem which, more than any other, expresses a relief from uni? versal flux. In each of its ten cantos, Stevens expresses one that we can perceive a permanence, a wholeness in summer. Stevens's credences do not, however, at poem's end, comprise a uni? fied system of belief, nor do they provide us with a still picture of summer. Although he offers us a vibrant summer world ? complete with greenery, roses, hay, birds and their accompanying hymns, silences and birdsongs ? and confidently urges us believe in summer's wholeness, Stevens's voice is not uniform. While some cantos express an exhilarating, even an empowering belief in our ability attain wholeness within natural world, others admit more doubt and even question, at times, whether such permanence is possible. Stevens's unevenness of tone in Credences of Summer has, in large part, sparked critical controversy that has surrounded poem. In contrast those critics who argue that Stevens's