ABSTRACT
In a letter to Latimer on November 15, 1935, Stevens apologized for the luscious sound play of “The Comedian as the Letter C,” explaining that “subject wasn’t quite the same thing” in the 20s as in the 30’s (L 294). This not only demonstrates his awareness that that the thirties poet should deal poetically with the difficult realities of the present, but also suggests that he felt a need to rethink the possible relations between sound and sense; or between “sense (the signified) and the senses (sensory signifier),” whose “separation” as Derrida has argued, “is enunciated by means of the same root (sensus, Sinn).”1 In any case, the subject of poetry at the time could not be the ‘reality’ of poetic language itself or, as in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” its sounds,2 but needed to be reality, as it were, ‘outside’ the sphere of poetic language. Thus, Stevens’ attempt to justify his early Florida poems to Latimer, as having “actual backgrounds” explaining that “[t]he real world seen by an imaginative man may very well seem like an imaginative construction”3 was likely to fail. The actuality (or ‘kind’ of actuality) looked for at the time was clearly not that of the colors of the imagination, or of solitary epiphany, but needed to be explicitly to do with the difficult social and political realities of the day.
