the comedian as the letter c, part 3, stanza 4, by wallace stevens

He came.  The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring.
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared.  The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness.  A river bore
The vessel inward.  Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.
He savored rankness like a sensualist.
He marked the marshy ground around the dock,
The crawling railroad spur, the rotten fence,
Curriculum for the marvelous sophomore.
It purified.  It made him see how much
Of what he saw he never saw at all.
He gripped more closely the essential prose
As being, in a world so falsified,
The one integrity for him, the one
Discovery still possible to make,
To which all poems were incident, unless
That prose should wear a poem’s guise at last.

(from, Stevens Collected Poetry & Prose, p.28)

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So, the new poet has appeared on the scene, one without the trickery of the merely 'decorous' sleight-of-hand, but the 'modern' poet, who looks at 'things as they are.'  (remember, the 'ding an sich'?)  We are reminded of Williams, and his poem 'Smell!'  The novelty is that prose can now be poetry, and the subjects of prose - even of invoices, such as 'lumber,' 'sacks,' and 'docks' - can now become the fit subjects of 'poesy.'