Stevens' "1922 Dial Group": To Urgency from "Horrid Cocoons"

"[Stevens] could not have written the group of poems that appeared in The Dial in 1922 as early as 1915 or 1916.  In them he is simply too exuberantly confident in his abilities, supremely sure, as he tells the woman in "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," that "poetry is the supreme fiction"; the speaker in "Bantams in Pine-Woods" bristles in defiance, and the wit, the words, and sounds bristle, too, in a way not evident in the earlier poems.  The other poems in the group---"The Ordinary Women," "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs," "O Florida, Venereal Soil," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"---have, taken altogether, an extravagance of conception and an energy of language and tone that approach the violences of imagination that Stevens sought but had not found in the earlier poems.

As the 1922 Dial group indicates, he became less rococo, less exquisite and coy, and more baroque and boisterous.  Though the changes in his style are of degree, the general tendency is away from Keats, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, Parnassians, and Decadents, away from Verlaine, away from the more attenuated qualities of the Symbolists and the ironic disillusionment of Laforgue, and toward Whitman and the gusto of the Elizabethans, toward the hugely fantastic situations and points of view, and the essential gaudiness of word and metaphor with which Stevens probed to the limits of the imagination's power.  Also, his early Imagist techniques were absorbed into his other qualities.  And he moved from Fragonard and Watteau to the Fauves and beyond, from orientalism to a more intensive use of Impressionistic technique.

[...]

Such glorious excesses marked the end of the first phase of Stevens' poetic career.  And although he would say with extreme self-effacement, at the time when Harmonium was about to be published, that his earliest Harmonium poems seemed "like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insides have sprung," he must at the same time have realized that the best of the poems in Harmonium are major twentieth-century poems.  They are major poems not simply because they brilliantly combine a variety of elements into an incomparable style but also because the style grew out of the urgency of the poet's search for meaningful relationships between imagination and reality, art and banality, order and violence, life and death."

[from The Making of Harmonium by Robert Buttel, Princeton University Press, 1967]