Je tache, en restant exact, d'etre poete

"Je tâche, en restant exact, d'être poète," which translated from the French reads, "I try, being exact, to be a poet," is the epigraph to Stevens' poem "United Dames of America" (Parts of a World). It is credited to Jules Renard (1864-1910), a French novelist, playwright, and diarist. Stevens had read some of Renard's published journals, commenting in a letter to Henry Church that "Renard constantly says things that interest me immensely. They are, however, on the literary level on which it seems possible to say such things for a lifetime and yet be forgotten on the way home from the funeral" (Stevens 510).
"United Dames of America" critiques the "mass man," saying that:
 "The mass is nothing. The number of men is a mass
 Of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than
 The singular man of the mass. Masses produce
 Each one in its paradigm."
There is not, in fact, "leaves/ Enough to hide away the face of the man/ Of this dead mass and that...." We are given insight into this in the further comments Stevens makes in his letter to Church, where he says "the writer is never recognized as one of the masters of our lives, although he gives them their daily color and form. This position is reversed for politicians. Just as someone said that woman is nature, so a politician is life. The writer is a fribble"(510). "Leaves," then might be woman as nature, which cannot overcome the "dead mass" of maleness critiqued in the poem. Likewise, the use of Renard's words as epigraph might suggest that Stevens, as poet, seeks to be the "singular man" as distinct from the overwhelming mass (which threatens the writer with "fribbleness").
WORKS CITED
Stevens, Wallace. Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. Berkley: U of
 California P, 1966. Print