 It has been objected that a criticism
suggesting that poems spring from life is reductive, that is to say
that "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" is about Stevens' failed marriage is
somehow injurious to the poem.It seems to me normal to begin with the
life-occasion as we deduce it from the poem; it is only an error when
one ends there.To tether Stevens' poems to human feeling is at least
to remove him from the "world of ghosts" where he is so often located,
and to insist that he is a poet of more than epistemological questions
alone.