"And Daughters with Curls" is the sixth and final canto of Wallace Stevens's long poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," published in 1923 in the collection Harmonium. This concluding section brings to a close the extended narrative of Crispin, an ironic everyman figure whose intellectual and artistic ambitions have been progressively tested, deflated, and transformed by his encounters with reality across the poem's arc. The canto opens with a call for music and language to gather themselves into a fitting summation of Crispin's final philosophical position. The elaborate, self-conscious sound of the verse enacts what it describes, as portentous syllables and musical cadences are summoned to proclaim Crispin's last deduction with ceremonial grandeur. This performative flourish is immediately ironic, since the deduction itself proves to be a retreat from grand ambition rather than its fulfillment. Crispin's final condition is domestic. He has fathered four daughters, and the canto presents them as the ultimate product of his colonizing energies, which were once directed toward reshaping poetry, landscape, and philosophical doctrine but have now been absorbed entirely into the life of a provincial householder. The daughters are described with affectionate but comic detail. The first is delicate and blushing, absorbed in secret singular things. The second is sisterly and shy, only half awake to the world. The third gazes at orioles and fancies herself a poetess inclined toward rhapsody. The fourth is loud, pink, and gleefully disruptive. Together they are characterized as four instruments, four voices, four mirrors, four seeds, and four questioners paired with four answerers, a proliferating catalog that simultaneously celebrates their vitality and frames them as the somewhat absurd terminus of Crispin's philosophical journey. The poem's central irony reaches its culmination here. Crispin set out as an ambitious aesthete seeking to forge a new poetic doctrine adequate to the New World, to strip away old European conventions and encounter reality directly. What he has produced instead is a family and a cabin, a thoroughly ordinary domestic existence. The world, once a turnip he believed he could uproot and replant according to his own stiffest realist program, has reproduced itself in its original insoluble form despite all his interventions. He has become a fatalist who swallows this irresolvable reality without complaint, having surrendered his reforming ambitions to the simple fact of life continuing on its own terms. Stevens allows Crispin a kind of dignity in this resignation. The daughters, though comic, are genuine and alive, representing a real if modest form of creativity. The cabin has become a sanctified domestic space, described as a phylactery, a dome, and a halidom, terms that invest the ordinary household with mock-sacred significance. Crispin's bloom, his organic vitality, has not died but has simply expressed itself in biological rather than artistic or intellectual terms, in children rather than poems or doctrines. The final movement of the canto acknowledges openly the possibility that the entire poem has been a failure, that its music is false, that Crispin is a profitless philosopher who began with inflated ambition and concluded in fadedness, fickle and fumbling, illuminating only plain and common things from a fancy bloated by illusion. Stevens raises this self-critical possibility with unusual directness, but then deflects it with a characteristic shrug: what does it matter, since the relation comes, benignly, to its end. The closing line, so may the relation of each man be clipped, generalizes Crispin's experience into a universal condition. Every man's story is cut short, rounded off, concluded without achieving the grand designs it began with. The word clipped carries overtones of both abbreviation and trimming, suggesting that life prunes human pretension back to manageable domestic scale. The canto thus ends the poem on a note that is simultaneously deflationary and consoling. Crispin has not achieved the poetic revolution he imagined, but he has produced four daughters, a functioning household, and a stoic if undramatic peace with the world as it is. Stevens presents this outcome with wit and ironic affection rather than tragedy, suggesting that the comedian's accommodation to reality, however inglorious, is its own kind of wisdom and that the ordinary persistence of life, embodied in the noisy, curious, blossoming daughters, constitutes an answer of sorts to every ambitious philosophical question the poem has raised.
By Wallace Stevens