Leonidas

The most famous Leonidas, of course, is Leonidas I, the Spartan king who led the Greek army at the famous Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C. Stevens never refers to this particular Leonidas, however. In the short essay entitled “Effects of Analogy,” Stevens does refer to Leonidas of Tarentum, a Greek epigrammatist and lyric poet of the third century B.C.. Stevens also enjoyed a correspondence with Leonidas Warren Payne Jr., an American linguist and professor of English who reviewed his first book of poetry, Harmonium. 
==Leonidas of Tarentum==
This Leonidas is mentioned twice in Stevens’s essay, “Effects of Analogy.” On page 718 of Collected Poetry and Prose, Stevens quotes these lines from Leonidas: 
Even as a vine on her dry pole I support myself now on a staff[,] and death calls me to Hades[.] 
These come from the sixth stanza of Leonidas’s poem, “The Withered Vine.” The rest of the poem runs thus: 
Be not obstinately deaf, O Gorgus; what is it the sweeter for thee if for three or four summers yet thou shalt warm thyself beneath the sun? So saying the aged man quietly put his life aside, and removed his house to the greater company.
The Greek poet has offered an example of what Stevens calls “voluntary images” (721). In short, Stevens divides analogies into several groups.
1)      Allegory
2)      Emotional images, where the analogy has strong emotive effects.
3)      Voluntary Images, i.e., images artfully chosen by the poet for a deliberate rhetorical end.
4)      Involuntary images, i.e., images that arise strictly from the poet’s temperament. (Stevens cites representative examples from James Thomson and Walt Whitman.)
For Stevens, what makes an analogy like Leonidas’s stand out is the “discipline of rightness,” the extreme appropriateness of comparing a vine on a dry pole with an old mean, close to death, leaning on a staff. Some voluntary images, however, don’t quite “click” (714). As an example, Stevens offers one comparison  made by Virgil between farmers after summer and sailors after a voyage.
==Leonidas Warren Payne, Jr.==
Stevens wrote two letters to L.W. Payne, Jr.. The first one comes in 1927. Stevens offers congratulations for an “intelligent & interesting” reading of Harmonium, although he supposes Payne “bewigs” the innocence of the poems a little too much (Letters 249-50). The second letter, dated a year later, offers an poem-by-poem response to some of Payne’s claims—in the process adding more helpful glosses for future readers and scholars.