... stop hunting for “meaning,” per se, and simply look at the poems as imaginative brain-clouds you get to ride along on.
“Stevens’s poems force us, as great poems always do, to live in the occasion of their language — not simply to extract a ‘meaning’ from the language,” James Longenbach, a poet and the author of a book about Stevens, explained to me in an e-mail. “The point is not so much to understand the poems (for when we understand something, we don’t need it anymore, and we don’t read it again); the point is to inhabit the poems. By doing so, we recognize that our humanity is not constituted by our ‘mastery’ of something. It is constituted by our willingness to humble ourselves to the ‘mystery’ of something.”