To the One of Fictive Music by Wallace Stevens

To The One Of Fictive Music is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1922, so it is in the public domain. Stevens, the musical imagist, invokes the muse of poetry for "an image that is sure" in a kind of music that "gives motion to perfection more serene" than other forms of music summoned by the human condition. The poet aims at a kind of simplicity and spurns "the venom of renown". The poet's muse might be compared in these respects to Socrates' philosophical muse. Socrates condemned the sophists, and Stevens's queen rejects vices analogous to theirs in poetry. The dim view of renown poetically reinforces the Adagia dictum, "Poetry is, (and should be,) for the poet, a source of pleasure and satisfaction, not a source of honors."

There is a heaviness in the human condition that poetry and other forms of inspiration alleviate. (See for instance the human, "heavy and heavy", in The Wind Shifts. Also the malady in Banal Sojourn.) The poet "muses the obscure" in what is near to us, vaunting the clearest bloom among those offered by the "sisterhood of the living dead". This way of characterizing the various muses may emphasize humanity's mortality and limited powers.

But the nearness is not idiosyncratic. "Poetry is not personal," as Stevens writes in Adagia. And the clearness is not too clear. The poet's musician resists the intellect, "saving a little to endow our feignings with the strange unlike". This is an expression of the Adagia thesis that poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.

The poem concludes with a reminder of the musical imagist's serious purpose. The poetic musician wears a band "set with fatal stones".