Homunculus et la Belle Etoile

Homunculus et la Belle Etoile is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in 1919, which puts it in the public domain in the United States.

Commentary
The poem pursues a contrast between poetic imagination and philosophical reasoning, the latter understood as abstract system-building associated with the rationalist tradition going back to Plato. Stevens implicitly contrasts the philosophers' Plato with `the ultimate Plato'. Both seek the supreme good, but Plato and the other philosophers look for it in something abstract like Plato's `Forms' — a gaunt fugitive phantom. The poet finds the highest good in the sensuous lived experience of an evening in Biscayne, where the good light of Venus, the Evening Star, reveals it to the poet as wanton, abundantly beautiful, eager, fecund. Plato's supreme good is accessible only to a very few intelligent people who have been trained for many years to disregard the senses. The ultimate Plato by contrast is accessible not only to the poet but also the drunkard, widows, and ladies soon to be married. Stevens may be invoking some American populism on behalf of the imagination. (For comparison see On the Manner of Addressing Clouds and Six Significant Landscapes.)