Wallace Stevens' experimental one-act play Bowl, Cat and Broomstick (1917) occupies a decidedly minor niche in the Wallace Stevens canon. Stevens' two other dramatic works, Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise (1916) and Carlos Among the Candles (1917), inspired positive reviews from America's literati: Three Travelers won Poetry magazine's $100 prize for an original theatrical piece in 1916, with the justification that although Stevens' play would probably not be understood by "more than a fraction of [its] audience... in this formative moment of our poetic drama, when the future looks large before us and nobody can tell what it will bring forth, the original creative impulse should be encouraged" ("Prize" 160). The judges' fear that Stevens' brand of experimental drama would not "get across" ("Prize" 160) to its spectators proved apt in the cases of Carlos and Bowl, which drew derisive commentary after they were performed—apparently with little success—by the Wisconsin Players in 1917 (Axelrod and Deese 2-3).

Although Harriet Monroe would later praise the Provincetown Playhouse's 1920 rendition of Three Travelers as fulfilling W.B. Yeats' conditions for the ideal "Poetic Drama... as closely as any little-theatre enterprise is likely to do in our time and our country" (Monroe 34), Stevens had by this time abandoned his interest in poetic drama and set his sights on the publication of Harmonium, which would appear in 1923. Bowl, Cat and Broomstick was never published during Stevens' lifetime; it was not printed until 1969, when Quarterly Review included the play in its summer issue.[1] Nevertheless, Bowl remains a fascinating example of Stevens' early attempts to expand the frontiers of Modernist dramatic and poetic forms by igniting the creative spark that would hopefully "blaze new trails" ("Prize" 160) in literature.

Bowl has generated little critical commentary, but those who have offered analyses of the play—most notably A. Walton Litz, whose short chapter on Stevens' theatrical experiments in Introspective Voyager includes a few pages on Bowl, and Maureen Kravec, whose article on the play appeared in the Fall 1991 issue of Twentieth Century Literature—point out that Bowl serves as an illuminating commentary on Stevens' poetic development and on "the paradoxes and complexities of Stevens' early verse" (Litz 58).[2] Kravec elucidates many of the historical and literary illusions that Stevens weaves into the text, and posits that Bowl functions in part as a "delightful essay in dramatic criticism" (Kravec 319). This essay will build from the premises of Litz's and Kravec's interpretations, offering a reading of the play that further examines Stevens' complex view of literary development and that expands upon textual allusions not taken up by Litz or Kravec.

Stevens insists, above all, on the necessity of acknowledging the fluidity and multiple resonances of the words that form the building blocks of his craft. He formulates Bowl, Cat and Broomstick as a dialogue, set in the seventeenth century, among its three eponymous characters as they read and discuss the work of Claire Dupray. Claire, a supposedly young French "poetess," explores in her literary efforts what Dupray calls "the incessant momentum that tranquillizes" (170). This concept proves key to understanding Stevens' critique of literature that remains hampered by imitation and lack of formal innovation. The wide range of allusive targets for Stevens' parody, which include La Pleiade, the Romantics, the Symbolists, the Imagists, and himself, locates Stevens' criticism in a historical tradition that dates back at least to the sixteenth century. Ultimately, I would argue, Stevens' play comments on both the motives behind and failures of modernist experimentation. Moreover, the very breadth of the parodic digs indicate that any artist "must be as free from to-day as from yesterday" (175) in order to make a truly "new" contribution to his artistic field; the past is both prologue and prison.

Stevens' choice of the seventeenth century as the setting for Bowl, Cat and Broomstick sets his play against a historical backdrop that provides depth to his commentary on literary development over the centuries. Stevens' 1943 essay "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet" sheds light on his conception of how literary forms that emerged in the seventeenth century transmuted the rigid thought of their contemporary intellectuals into lasting art; the view expressed in this essay exemplifies the concern with being "one's self in one's day" (175) that informs Bowl:[3]

... when we think of the seventeenth century, it is to be remarked how much of the strength of its appearance is associated with the idea that this was a time when the incredible suffered most at the hands of the credible. We think of it as a period of hard thinking... When we look back at the face of the seventeenth century, it is at the rigorous face of the rigorous thinker and, say, the Miltonic image of a poet, severe and determined. In effect, what we are remembering is the rather haggard background of the incredible, the imagination without intelligence, from which a younger figure is emerging... This younger figure is the intelligence that endures. It is the imagination of the son still bearing the antique imagination of the father. It is the clear intelligence of the young man still bearing the obscurities of the old. It is the spirit out its own myth, delineating with accurate speech the complications of which it is composed. (NA 52-3)[4]

Stevens suggests in this essay that the seventeenth century marked a transition in which youthful poets began to differentiate themselves from the "severe and determined" imaginative efforts of their predecessors. While Stevens' comment that the seventeenth century "was a time when the incredible suffered at the hands of the credible" initially seems to privilege the incredible over the "haggard" form of credibility prevalent in that period, we learn later in the essay that Stevens locates "poetic truth" within "the truth of credible things" (NA 53). Stevens' youthful poet must reconcile the imagination not with the incredible, but rather with an "intelligence" that will enable him to sort through "the obscurities of the old" and clearly articulate the complexities of his age.

In "The Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet," Stevens formulates the poet's task as the expression of an enduring "spirit" distilled from the proliferation of myth that surrounds him. In Bowl, Stevens subjects Claire Dupray to the test of these standards for literary virility. When Bowl claims that one of Claire Dupray's poems serves as an "instance of good seventeenth century work... Such things are not myths" (175), Broomstick counters that Claire's aesthetics derive from "the most fascinating myths in the world" (175). Claire, according to Broomstick, remains mired in obscurity and fails to display the intelligence that would enable her to convey a sense of poetic truth in her work. Claire is "free" neither from contemporary "myth" nor from slavish imitation of past formal models.

It soon becomes clear in Bowl, Cat and Broomstick that Stevens' concern with seventeenth-century literary development extends to his evaluation of the state of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century poetry. John Dryden's 1668 "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy," according to Kravec, "apparently served as the model" for Stevens' play (Kravec 310). Arthur C. Kirsch claims that the "distinctive contribution" of Dryden's essay to contemporary criticism lies with "its simple recognition that English drama is different from classical drama, written for a different audience and based upon a different idea of theater, and thus impossible to judge on the basis of standards derived from either classical or French neoclassical practice" (Kirsch 3). Stevens appropriates Dryden's model in part to justify his experimentation with early twentieth-century poetic drama. Proponents of the contemporary little theatre were providing their audiences with a dramatic experience quintessentially different from that offered by more traditional drama, and therefore poetic drama should not be judged according to traditional standards. Stevens' implied defense of his chosen genre, however, displays an underlying anxiety about the difficulties inherent in producing truly original work. While Stevens parodies techniques and themes of the Romantics, Imagists, and Symbolists, the fact that these poetic schools had heavily influenced his own stylistic development indicates that Bowl includes its author among its parodic targets.[5] Bowl thus alludes to historical debates over artistic progress in order to shed light on similar but contemporary debates over poetic forms that helped to shape Stevens' career.

Bowl, Cat and Broomstick explores these aspects of literary development by presenting its readers with an odd assortment of characters whose costumes and personae display the influence of seventeenth-century commedia dell'arte characters and whose conversation centers around literary concerns germane to a wide range of historical periods.[6] The play begins with an exchange between Bowl and Cat in which Bowl demonstrates difficulty translating the poetry of Claire Dupray from its original French. This dialogue introduces several key themes in Stevens' play through the persistent stutter that Bowl exhibits in his translations, and through the debate that ensues over Bowl's assignation of meaning to the word "rouges":

BOWL [with finical importance]: She says—m—m—she says—m. [patronizing Cat] I shall continue to translate this for you. Fleurs—des fleurs—full of flowers—full of tawny flowers—

CAT [a little bored]: Tawny? What is the word for tawny?

BOWL: Rouges.

CAT: But, Bowl, rouges means red.

BOWL [coolly]: No doubt, when it refers to something red. But when, as here, it refers to something tawny, then it means tawny.

Bowl's stutter, which recurs throughout the play, suggests that he has become caught in a repetitive cycle of sounds and ideas that impedes his ability to move past the "m—" that continually surfaces; the uncertainty that his stutter implies undermines the confidence in Claire's poetry that he projects. Stevens' exasperation with the snares of literary "progress" acts as a potent critique of the "incessant momentum" that often fails to produce artistic originality. Bowl's perpetual "m—" delivers the force of Stevens' critique through a parodic examination of the sentimental orientation of Claire's poetry.

The characters' debate over how to translate the word "rouges" enacts a tension between time and the meaning of words, with Broomstick's insistence on semantic malleability at one pole of the argument, and Bowl's attempt to propound a biographical profile of Claire from characteristics that he attributes to her portrait, which is included with her volume of poetry, on the other. Bowl's translation of "rouges" as "tawny" initially seems to indicate that he agrees with Broomstick's position. However, as Broomstick later points out, Bowl's interpretation does not in fact imbue Claire's poetry with resonant fluidity, but rather exposes Bowl's notion of Claire's personality as static in its emphasis on a timeless aesthetic. Bowl claims that Claire's "portrait" age of approximately twenty-two, which he supposes to be her current age, justifies his use of the word "tawny," for twenty-two is an age of "mystery," when "red becomes tawny," and "blue becomes aerial" (169). Broomstick supports Bowl's decision to translate "rouges" as "tawny," and sides with Bowl against Cat, telling the latter that "a man with so firm a faith in the meaning of words should not listen to poetry" (169). This statement expresses his conviction that readers and writers of poetry must approach words with the recognition that semantic malleability renders poetry a dynamic art.[7] Bowl, on the other hand, uses the word "tawny" because he believes that Claire's poetry is best read in accordance with her appearance of youthful attractiveness. While we later learn that Claire has matured since the publication of her volume, Bowl's aesthetic sensibilities have not. He thus reads Claire's poetry and portrait through the lens of a sensual idealism that is itself a type of "stutter"; Bowl's translation locates meaning only within the narrow parameters of his naivete.

Claire's poetry exhibits an attempt to overcome the stumbling blocks of time by claiming a transcendent relationship with nature. Bowl's reading of Claire's poem on twilight focuses on the ways in which her effusively emotional poetic meditations correspond to her view of the universe:

BOWL: Take this poem on twilight. What does she see in twilight? Not the commonplace end of daily momentum. She sees the light continuing to burn in stars. She says that the sun burns all night. And, in that, she sees the incessant momentum that tranquillizes because it is immortal. The sun burns all night. She says that she will love as long as she lives. (170)

Claire's twilight poem claims to engage her with the universe on a level outside of time. Quotidian cycles of day and night do not intrude upon her poetic ruminations; although darkness descends each day, she claims that she retains access to the "light" of poetic inspiration by keeping in mind that "the sun burns all night." She rejects the cycles of "daily momentum" in favor of a more eternal, "incessant momentum." She then associates this transcendence of the "commonplace" with an immortality that releases her poetry from temporal pressures. Claire posits a metaphysical sphere that links her timelessness with her emotions: "she says that she will love as long as she lives." Nevertheless, the metaphor of "the incessant momentum that tranquillizes" suggests, in terms of Stevens' theme of poetic paralysis—the failure to be new or even to be "oneself in one's day" (175)—that Claire's cosmic placidity is in fact a type of developmental quagmire in literary history.

Bowl's stutter thus continues to hamper his translation of Claire's poetry; he remains unable to leave behind the persistent "m—m—" introduced at the beginning of the play. Its first recurrence takes place during a reading of Claire's "The Shadow in the Trees," a poem that aims its parodic thrusts at the Romantic correspondence between self and nature and at Imagist formal techniques:

BOWL [translating à la mode]: In the motion of trees, m—m—that is, in the movement of trees, I find my own agitation. If it be morning, the mood of poplars, filled with the sunlight, glistening in the dark west-wind, is already my own. If it be noon, the tossing of the elm trees in the golden sky, moving not at all, defining their beauty through the obscure air, m—m—m—These things are atrociously difficult in English. In French they are almost pellucid. Let me see: the forms of trees, moving not at all, outlining their beauty across the dim air, or in the midst of the dim air—the forms of the trees are the only images in my mind. She means that the images in her mind are of the forms of trees and that there are no other images there. (174)

While this selection from Claire's work displays a Romantic influence in its emphasis on the "agitation" Claire finds in the "mood of poplars" and in the "exulting" that she gleans from gazing upon the landscape, it moves into an evocation of the Imagist focus on form as it relates to sensation. The trees that comprise "the only images in [Claire's] mind" recall the Imagist principle that "the image had to be clear, pure, photographic—the center of the poet's thought. It was not allowed to remain hazy, but to be admired in all its clarity" (Taupin 92).

However, "The Shadow in the Trees" displays flaws even according to this definition. The indistinct backdrop of Claire's poem mars the Imagist tenet of clarity and purity in the presentation of images. The poplars in the morning contend with the "dark west-wind"; the evening trees must "define their beauty through the obscure air"; and the formal "outline" of Claire's poetic trees is visible only through "dim air." Bowl's stutter, and his disclaimer that the pathos of Claire's poetry is "almost pellucid" in the original but "atrociously difficult" to convey in English, demonstrates that even he, Claire's greatest champion in the play, is unable to sustain the sensual mode he praises in Claire's poetry. His rhetorical request for more time to think, "let me see," indicates that he in fact does not "see" and that Claire's poem is not "almost pellucid" in any language. Claire's aesthetic sensibility relies on imitation rather than evocative, progressive experimentation. Her lack of success suggests the difficulty of transcending the confines of established forms with which poets, including Stevens, must struggle.

Bowl's laudatory reflection on Claire's "The Shadow and the Trees"—"How new she is!" (174)—prompts Broomstick to request another reading that supports his emphatic disagreement with Bowl's evaluation of Claire. This reading extends the theme of Imagist parody to the point of total absurdity. Bowl introduces Claire's "Le Bouquet" as a poem in which Claire "tries to stimulate the sense of color and, therefore, her poem consists of nothing more than the names of colors. You read these rapidly and so produce in the mind a visual impression like that produced by the actual sight of dahlias" (174). This technique clearly refers to Imagist attempts to "give the whole force of the emotion" evoked by precise images, and to deploy metaphors designed to elicit reader response through the "rapidity of [the metaphors'] association," which would ostensibly release a "maximum of energy" from the poetry (Taupin 93). Yet this principle of rapid association and its ability to generate semantic energy is farcically exaggerated by Bowl's preparations for reading and by Cat's exhortation that Bowl read "just as rapidly as [he] can" (174). Furthermore, the poem itself achieves nothing like the sensual stimulation that Bowl promises:

BOWL: Green, green, green—no doubt, this indicates the stalks—green, green, green, green, green, yellow, green, yellow, green, green, gray, green, yellow, yellow, white, white, white, green—

BROOMSTICK: We ought to be getting to the flowers soon.

BOWL: We're right in them now. The white, white, white indicates white flowers, white dahlias.

BROOMSTICK: I am sorry. I was thinking of a white holder. I thought we had come up the stalks and were going around the edge of the holder. (174)

As Broomstick's reaction indicates, Claire's poem lacks the precision of focus required by Imagist techniques. Her litany of colors results only in confusion among those who listen to the poem. Furthermore, the repetition central to "Les Dahlias" produces a sonorous, almost soporific effect whereby the words lose their distinctness and melt into a hopelessly abstract aural and visual vagueness. Claire's "momentum" as a poet is indeed "incessant" and tranquillizing, for "Le Bouquet" succeeds only in replicating the most unsuccessful traits of Imagist experiments. Claire's flaws as a poet stem from her lack of technical proficiency, from her failure to express original artistic vision, and from her penchant for imitation of outmoded forms. As Broomstick remarks, "it is bad enough that Claire Dupray imitates at all. But it is fatal that she imitates the point of view and the feelings of a generation ago" (175).

Litz and Kravec have pointed out that Stevens himself made use of the poetic techniques that he parodies in Claire. Stevens' interest in "images and colors that could stir his imagination and freshen familiar themes" (Litz 14) derived from a fascination with Chinese and Japanese art, especially in what Stevens referred to as the sense of "irreality" that he gleaned from Chinese painting (qtd. in Litz 15). This fascination manifested itself, as Litz and Kravec observe, in an early Stevens poem called "Colors" (1909) that bears a striking resemblance to Claire's "Le Bouquet":

I

Pale orange, green and crimson, and
white, and golden and brown.

II

Lapis-lazuli and orange, and opaque green,
faun-color, black and gold. (OP 2-3)

Litz notes that the complexity of response demanded by readers of "Colors" fails to "carry the burden of [Stevens'] perceptions; it is vague and derivative, a poetry of 'mood' rather than idea, and we are reminded that Stevens began his career under the influence of the academic romanticism which characterized Harvard poetry at the turn of the century" (16). Stevens thus directly implicates his own work in the criticism implied by his later parody of Claire. While he addresses the imprecision of unsuccessful attempts to incorporate Imagist techniques into poetic form generally, he simultaneously parodies the pitfalls of his skills as an ephebe.

Bowl also explores the ramifications of Stevens' concerns with literary schools and artistic progress on a national level. Broomstick's allusion to the descriptive resemblance between Bowl's image of Claire and any "one of the many dark-haired and dark-eyed Peloponnesians," especially in conjunction with Bowl's reference to the set of poems in which Claire studies herself as "the racial Claire" (173), emphasizes a sense in which Claire's appearance and her poetry refer to national identification with competing aesthetic ideologies. This interpretation gains support if one remembers the model of Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy and its characters' debate over the quality of English drama as measured against that of the French and the ancient Greeks. Stevens' reference to the appearance of "Peloponnesians" as a possible comparison to Claire suggests the Greek aesthetic sensibility championed by Crites, while Claire's national origin suggests the French aesthetic for which Lysideius argues in Dryden's essay. Dryden's Neander overcomes the arguments of his companions by counseling that English dramatists do their craft the most justice when they learn from the advances of the Ancients but remain progressive, retaining a strong sense of formal innovation and national pride. Claire, however, fails to fulfill Neander's conditions for formal progress. As Broomstick claims, Claire's poetry "is all thirty years old at the least. Thirty years old at the very least. I might have even put it in the last century" (175). Furthermore, Broomstick's admonishment to Bowl—"your young poetess is an old poetess" (171)—points out not only that Claire has aged in the interval since her portrait was painted, but also that her poetry exemplifies an "old," and by implication passé, national and historical aesthetic.

Bowl falls into similar traps in his ekphrastic contemplation of Claire's portrait, which is printed with her collection of poetry. This contemplation is motivated by Bowl's attempt, as Broomstick claims, to "derive from ink and paper a vivid impression of the sensibility of his poetess" (171). His endeavor is consistent with James A.W. Heffernan's description of the tendency in seventeenth-century ekphrastic poems to "praise the artist's ability to make a face and figure express the mind" (92). Bowl, however, makes the mistake of attempting to deduce "vitally biographical" knowledge from Claire's pictorial representation (171); he conceives a desire for Claire that denies her mortality by claiming that her portrait reveals her as she is, rather than as she was at the time of the sitting. This brings the dynamic qualities of artistic sensibility and personality into conflict with the static nature of portraiture. Furthermore, Bowl and Cat's conscious decision to postpone their reading of the biographical preface that accompanies Claire's volume illustrates the "struggle for dominance between the image and the word" that characterizes ekphrastic activity (Heffernan 1). Bowl expresses a clear preference for the image over the explanatory preface, while Broomstick insists that the preface and Claire's poetry serve as more accurate markers of character.

This struggle is in turn complicated by the fact that Claire's portrait, as well as the characters who gaze upon it, remain constructs of Stevens' literary imagination. Notional ekphrasis, the term coined by Hollander for the verbal representation of an imaginary work of art (Heffernan 7), carries temporal ramifications that illuminate the conflict of subjectivities embodied in Bowl, Cat and Broomstick. Heffernan claims that notional ekphrasis, since it "does not even presuppose the existence of the works of art it describes... need hardly treat them as exempt from the ravages of time and historical contingency" (91). Bowl, however, regards the portrait with an idealistic desire to succumb to its beauty, to interpret its "unsophisticated" charm as an "unaffected disclosure of [Claire's] relationship" with him, with other readers, and with her own poetic corpus (172). He thus aligns himself with the theme he discovers in Claire's work, the "incessant momentum that tranquillizes because of the notion that it is immortal," by denying the interpretive momentum that renders ekphrastic interpretation temporally mutable. Bowl prefers the tranquillity of Claire's ekphrastic immortality to the dynamicism of Claire's inevitable mortality. Broomstick, on the other hand, takes advantage of the properties of notional ekphrasis by emphasizing the fallacy of Bowl's claims to Claire's timelessness, and by placing her image squarely in its historically time-bound context: "Let her portrait be ever so charming. When all is said and done, she is a poetess in the old-maidenly sense of the word, not the brilliant and vivid creature you conceive her to be" (175). Broomstick thus submits Claire's portrait to the "ravages of time." His use of the adjective "old-maidenly" to describe Claire implies that her artistic efforts are spinsterish; her poetry lacks the spark of passion and thus fails to achieve developmental fruition. Indeed, Claire fails miserably to display the characteristics of the new "virile poet" whom Stevens extols in his later essay.

The "struggle for dominance between image and word" enacted in Broomstick and Bowl's ekphrastic conflict culminates in the victory of the "word," in the form of the biographical preface from which Broomstick excerpts details of Claire's education and literary influences. The preface reveals that Claire received much of her early intellectual training at the hands of her Calvinist mother, "a woman of pronounced devotional character, and of wide reading" (176). Broomstick selects three works from the list of books that Claire purportedly possessed at the time her volume was published. These works, the abbot of Bellozane's translation of Plutarch's Parallel Lives of Illustrious Greeks and Romans, Florio's Dictionary, and a volume of Du Bellay (176), place Claire in an intellectual context that bears out Broomstick's earlier claim that Claire's aesthetic sensibility hearkens back "thirty years at the very least," and perhaps back to "the last century" (175). The reference to Plutarch's Lives emphasizes the influence of classical, moralistic history on Claire, and supports Broomstick's derisive comment that Claire's portrait could easily correspond to the description of "one of the many dark-haired and dark-eyed Peloponnesians" (171). Florio's volume, A World of Words (1598), is the first known Italian-English dictionary. Claire's possession of a volume of Joachim Du Bellay, a mid-sixteenth century writer associated with the French Pleiade, calls to mind the efforts of Du Bellay and others associated with La Pleiade to enliven the French language by producing literature drawn from classical models but written in French, as opposed to Latin. Du Bellay's best-known work, Deffence et Illustration de la Langue francoyse (1549), defends the French language as a potentially "valuable source of national pride" (Castor 8).[8]

However, twentieth-century writers who comment on La Pleiade generally disparage their theories and poetry as "almost trivial, and certainly rather disappointing" examples of literary innovation (Castor 4). Broomstick's discovery that these authors form the building blocks of Claire's education proves, much to the chagrin of Bowl and Cat, that Claire in fact provides nothing "new" to the development of contemporary poetry. Claire comes to be associated with Calvinist doctrine, antique morals, dictionary-like correspondence between words and their translations, and a poetic school that had focused on infusing French literature with new life but had only produced, in Ezra Pound's opinion, "wastage and servile imitation" (Pound 228).

This discovery and the revelation that Claire in 1667—the year in which Stevens' drama is set—would be fifty-three years old, provides the denouement of the play. Bowl rushes off the stage, distraught, leaving Broomstick and Cat to conclude with an exchange in which Broomstick sardonically suggests that Cat's literal adherence to the meaning of the word "rouges" may in fact be appropriate given Claire's advanced age. Cat responds by mourning the dismantling of the sensual mystique that had enticed him: "Oh, red, red! Acutely red! Damn all portraits of poets and poetesses" (177). This lament, with its pun on "acutely read," provides the opening for Broomstick to offer a strategy for reading as the play's finale: "one should always read a preface first" (177). This advice hints, as Kravec points out, that "anyone who would understand his or her own time must grasp the nature of the past as preface" (Kravec 318). Bowl and Cat, disillusioned by the biographical setting in which Broomstick grounds Claire with the aid of the preface to her volume of poetry, finally must confront the ineffectiveness of their projection of a mythological ideal onto a time-bound work of art. Broomstick counsels, in alignment with Stevens' figure of the "virile poet," that in order for literature to progress, the artist must temper the flights of the imagination with perceptive and incisive thought; the "obscurities of the old" must not obfuscate the "intelligence that endures" (NA 53; 52). While Claire Dupray does not receive a second opportunity to try her poetic skill against Stevens' literary virility test, Stevens himself would continue to explore the themes he presents in Bowl in later poetry, particularly in poems such as "Sea Surface Full of Clouds" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar." These, along with many of his later works, help to refine his notion that "what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great confusion" (OP 233) is poetic reflection on the myths of the past, on the "reality" of the present, and on the creative spirit that emerges from these temporal contingencies to render the artistic enterprise worthwhile.