"Stevens
gradually develops, as his poetry progresses, a way of matching the
fluidity of time. He comes to write a poetry of flickering mobility,
a poetry in which each phrase moves so rapidly it has beginning and
ending at once. Instead of being fixed and unyielding, a solid piece
of language interacting with other words, each image recapitulates
within itself the coming into being of the moment and its
disappearance. The fluctuation between beginning and ending has
become so rapid that it takes place in a single phrase, or in a
'syllable between life / And death'."