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Many of the archetypes associated with the descent to the underworld inform close readings of poems by Wallace Stevens. His work generally shies away from the explicit formulations of declarative statements, in favor of implication and innuendo. As such, it touches the pulse of our time, as if it were a poetic version of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Nevertheless, a traditional iconography and vocabulary of form, associated with the nekyia, is to be found in such poems as "Sunday Morning," "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," and "Large Red Man Reading." The use of the myth in these poems connects them to a wide range of Modernist and Postmodernist works, in which the myth confers shape and significance, and serves as a metaphor for the processes of poetic composition.' Using the Homeric term nekyia for the descent into Hades (from Book II of The Odyssey), we might express this relationship in an equation: nekyia equals poesis.
Stevens began his career with one of the great versions of the Modernist descent to the underworld. "Sunday Morning," of 1915, begins with a "procession of the dead, / Winding across wide water," as the female protagonist of the poem passes in reverie "Over the seas, to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre" (p. 5).' The traditional iconography of the nekyia is unmistakable here; it links sea voyages to dreams and the underworld, as the protagonist crosses the water from the domestic comforts of the "peignoir," to the "sepulchre" on the yonder shore. The "old catastrophe" which "darkens among water lights" is not only the crucifixion, but an archetypal variant of the tempest and shipwreck which initiates the hero's departure into the mysteries of the otherworld. In the Odyssey, for example, the shipwreck leads eventually to the land of the Kimmerian shades, where Odysseus communes with the dead. These shadows represent the archetypal forms of the mythical imagination, a point James Hillman emphasizes by relating the word Hades "with eidos, ideational forms and shapes, ideas that form and shape life."3
These ideas take the form of the archetypes, the myths of our culture, which the nekyia traditionally provides a catalogue of, as in Book 11 of the Odyssey. In "Sunday Morning," the catalogue of mythic motifs includes the...