John Gould Fletcher frames the poem as expressing Stevens's view "that the artist can do nothing else but select out of life the elements to form a 'fictive' or fictitious reality."
John Gould Fletcher frames the poem as expressing Stevens's view "that the artist can do nothing else but select out of life the elements to form a 'fictive' or fictitious reality.
The result of this disintegration of the artist's personality is to be found in the poem which is entitled 'The Comedian as the Letter C....'"[1]The poem recounts Crispin's voyage from Bordeaux to Yucatán to North Carolina, a voyage of hoped-for growth and self-discovery, representing according to one of Stevens's letters "the sort of life that millions of people live",[2] though Milton Bates reasonably interprets it as a fable of his own career up to 1921.
[3] Interpreters diverge on whether to emphasize its comedic qualities, with Bates, or its serious intent, with Vendler;[4] to regard the journey as quixotic or partially successful.
In his travels he learns from the "green barbarism" of Yucatán, aware of a self possessing him that was not in him in the "crusty town" from which he sailed, developing an aesthetic "tough, diverse, untamed".
He travels next to North Carolina, which "helps him round his rude aesthetic out" by savoring rankness (burly smells of dampened lumber, etc.)