ABSTRACT
Walt Whitman's lines anticipate Wallace Stevens's later evocation of a powerfully ordinary and extraordinary beauty. Whitman's spiritual and psychic defence against death is infused with William Blake's visionary poetics of 'a bed of crimson joy' in 'The Sick Rose'. A Romantic dilemma which, for all of his reductive anti-Romanticism, Stevens understood when he writes that it is only through the 'sight' of 'the necessary angel of earth' that 'you see the earth again'. Stevens recognizes in practice the fictive nature of all imaginative constructs and interpretations, including the fictional nature of his own sense of 'The Idea or Order at Key West'. Whitman would have appreciated Stevens's knowledge that 'The enigmatical Beauty of each beautiful enigma / Becomes amassed in a total double-thing'. This enigmatic 'double-thing' is comprised of the sacred and the profane; the real and non-real; the something and nothing, which constitutes both authors experience of themselves and of their extraordinarily ordinary and yet beautiful universe.
