Voices in the Open: Wordsworth, Eliot, and Stevens

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we respond to his meaning. And he converses with more recent poets who seem antithetical to him and to each other. I want to listen to a small part of that con versation. T. S. thought a poet's most individual passages may be those in which dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously? but isn't noted for standing in that filial relation to Wordsworth, i Wallace Stevens preferred to think that past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc.,?and he could also say: Eliot and I are dead op posites.2 Nevertheless these three poets belong to a single company. Each has been accused of the egotistical sublime. Each is most social when most solitary. Wooers of the pensive muse, they are perplexed by an epistemological uncertainty that their ancestor Milton could still subjugate. But their hesitations and ambigui ties also render a faith that speech must disclose existence, that poetry must name. Each therefore knows the troubled way of the reflexive and self-transcending voice that moves in the open toward new words, new thresholds of meaning. And each finds that the long poem, the uneasy heir of the epic and georgic traditions, must now name the sustained attempt of that voice to name its calling. Their quarrels are those of close kin. The Prelude is addressed to a friend who could say that man's divinely established end is the growth of his reflex consciousness.3 But Four Quartets and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction are spoken by poets who have heard Le Serpent declare, Je m'?coute, et dans mes circuits, / Ma m?ditation murmure . From Coleridge to Val?ry, as poetry intends the illusion of reflexive spontaneity, a seeming virtue becomes a