ABSTRACT
Eliot could produce shock with the succinct image of "Apeneck Sweeney. Letting his arms hang down to laugh", and so illustrate his own vision of "that extraordinarily limited animal", man. "Apeneck" Sweeney is a major symbol in the modernist canon and so is the dialectical pairing of the "vertebrate in brown" and the nightingale's song. Wallace Stevens had his own way for dealing with naturalistic reduction, and it also entered into his views of poetry. Stevens was describing a sense of crisis in his determination to bring universal poetry, that is, the idealizing imagination, out from the misfortune of bassesse, a chronic reductivism of thought and ignobility of judgment. Without the intellectual candor of either religion or science, humanism could seem a moral complacency betrayed in a thousand ways by the biological animal, whatever the expression of optimistic faith in economic and social existence, ethical culture, or the secular languages of value.
