Ignorant Man, the

A long tradition exists in Western thought that knowledge does not increase happiness; only the ignorant man can be happy. As Ecclesiastes say, “He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.” In a more secular vein, Voltaire once wrote a short story called “The Good Brahmin.” The Brahmin tells a stranger that he has spent a lifetime in study and contemplation, struggling with questions about god and nature. The stranger then looks at the Brahmin’s neighbor, an unlearned old peasant woman, who is immensely content in her religious faith, and the stranger asks the Brahmin if it is not ironic that this peasant woman enjoys greater happiness than he. “Indeed,” says the Brahmin, “but it is a happiness I do not wish.”
Stevens means something quite similar in his description of the ignorant man. He explains the concept in a 1945 letter to José Rodríguez Feo . The ignorant man “has no ideas” of his own (Letters 512). Thinking individuals make “too much of everything in the world,” hurting their prospects for happiness, whereas an ignorant man takes society as it presents itself without delving too deeply into the heart of things. While happy, the ignorant man does suffer some trouble: “he still feels” (512). Although the idea is serious, the letter places the ignorant man in a slightly ridiculous context:
Pompilio [a mule] does not even feel. Pompilio is the blank realist who sees only what there is to see without feeling, without imagination, but with large eyes that require no spectacles. (512).
Thus a hierarchy is established: an unthinking beast à an ignorant (but feeling) man à a thinking man. 
==The Ignorant Man Within the Poetry==
As a character in the poetry, the ignorant man appears three times, once in “The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man ” and twice in “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction .”’
In the first poem, Stevens expresses his notion that only the ignorant man may be happy with these lines:
It may be that the ignorant man, alone,
Has any chance to mate his life with life
That is the sensual, pearly spouse, the life
That is fluent in even the wintriest bronze.
The poet, however, is not an ignorant man himself, since the poet works by the “sleight-of-hand” of language and the imagination.