Now I know it; only those artists who tend to fail interest me. Here is Lawler's passage on Stevens:
E.A. Robinson has a sonnet called "Credo" which, like a few of Stevens's poems, seeks almost by an act of will to affirm the capability of the finite imagination's attaining the infinite reality---the very large difference between the two poets is that Stevens usually resigns himself to failure, whereas Robinson, as in the disastrous sestet to this sonnet, blindly and like a mechanical optimist affirms fulfillment.
Justus George Lawler, Celestial Pantomime (1979)
Resigning to fail, choosing to fail, whatever. I need more time to work on Stevens...
