D ISCUSSION OF Wallace Stevens's final volume of poems, Rock (I954), has been unnecessarily solemn and doctrinaire. On one hand, much has been made of poet's debt to various philosophers. Marius Bewley, for example, writes, Poetry not metaphysics, but there such a thing as a philosophical poet, and Stevens deserves this title.' For Bewley, Stevens essentially an American Transcendentalist whose verse on point of tipping into mysticism.2 Platonic influence has been discussed by A. Alvarez, Santayana influence by Norman Holmes Pearson; and Frank Doggett has noted, in a recent article, that there are also parallels between Stevens's thought and doctrines of Bergson, Whitehead, and William James.' On other hand, Stevens's late poetry often deplored precisely because it does seem so philosophical. Thus, Roy Harvey Pearce argues that Stevens finally abandons real world completely for an ultimate humanism which paradoxically leads him toward a curious dehumanization. Stevens's late poems are the poems of a man who does nothing but make poems.4 The tragedy, Pearce says, is that to say yes, Stevens had in end to say no to so much-to jettison creative for decreative, actual for possible, men for man, world for Rock.5 Pearce's view echoed by Howard Nemerov, who complains, particulars are now being treated as though... they were already dissolved in generality, and by G. S. Fraser, who declares that late poems lack the urgency of human passion and the highest tension and are consequently like commentaries