“Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”: Stevens and Santayana Jerry Griswold SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I noticed striking resemblances between George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923) and Wallace Stevens’s The Rock, the poet’s last “book” of poems which appears in his Collected Poems (1954). The resemblances were so extensive, in fact, that I was willing to experiment with a hypothesis: that Santayana’s philosophical classic provided inspiration for Stevens’s book of twenty-five poems on a pretty much chapter-for-poem basis. For fifteen months during the Covid-19 quarantine and after, I tested this thesis in the company of some two dozen experts in literature and philosophy via twice-monthly Zoom discussions hosted by the Santayana Society.1 In light of others’ suggestions and critiques, I have been preparing a book-length study of how Stevens responded in The Rock to Santayana’s book. The following discussion of “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself” is a sample excerpt from that work-in-progress.2 To begin with, I should say that the connection between Santayana and Stevens has been widely recognized and frequently discussed: already by 1990, John Serio had identified more than three dozen books and critical essays that made links between the distinguished philosopher and the celebrated poet, and that work has continued.3 According to Samuel French Morse, Stevens’s literary executor, the poet owned all of Santayana’s books.4 And in the view of Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, “It is obvious that Santayana had a lifelong influence on my father” (69). Stevens encountered Santayana, the poet and popular young professor, as an undergraduate at Harvard (1897–1900); the two met now and then and exchanged sonnets on one occasion. For the next forty or so years, Stevens’s letters and essays make little mention of Santayana but this changed around the time Edmund Wilson published in The New Yorker a portrait of the old philosopher in his declining years in Rome (1946). During this period of renewed interest, Santayana begins to appear more frequently in Stevens’s letters and essays. Eventually, Stevens would publish a direct and moving homage to Santayana in his poem “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (1952). [End Page 91] During these same years, Stevens gave a lecture at the University of Chicago (in November of 1951) that would later be published as “A Collect of Philosophy.” In those remarks, he repeats his contention that poets could find many inspiring ideas in the work of philosophers. Among the wide range of philosophical concepts he mentions is the notion that perception always involves a delay between the event and the conception, and he points to Alfred North Whitehead’s observation that a system of location means that every point is related to every other point. In an indirect way, “A Collect of Philosophy” confirms Holly Stevens’s portrait of her father’s compositional techniques in Souvenirs and Prophecies: that he would return home from work in the afternoon, retreat to his library, and hunt in his readings and commonplace books for subjects upon which to compose his poems. In this regard, it’s safe to say that Stevens would have found in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith a goldmine of the kind of epistemological ideas he found inspiring. Yet let me be clear: I can point to no mention of Santayana’s book by Stevens, nor can I offer any other proof that he read or consulted it. But that is to be expected. While James Joyce made no secret of the fact that Homer’s work provided the structure and some of the inspiration for his Ulysses, Stevens bristled at any suggestion that he was influenced by others, because the idea struck him as a challenge to his originality; Harold Bloom has called this “the anxiety of influence.” Stevens grew testy, for example, when a graduate student asked about the philosophers who had influenced him, and he hotly insisted that he had no interest in “systematic philosophy” and would be “bored to death” by it (L 636). My sense is that he “doth protest too much...