Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 - August 2, 1955) was an American Modernist poet.

Poetry

Stevens' subjects are the interplay between imagination and reality, and the relation between consciousness and the world. In Stevens, "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness, or "reality" to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Or rather — as the title of one of his late poems puts it — Stevens sees reality "as the activity of the most august imagination."

Related Topics:
Imagination - Reality - Consciousness

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Reality is an activity, not a static object, because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world. Stevens sees the poet (who, as for Wordsworth, is qualitatively the same as other people) as continually creating and discarding cognitive depictions of the world. These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, "It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self." His most general and impressive statement in this vein comes in a poem called "Men Made out of Words," in which he says: "Life / Consists of propositions about life.".

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Stevens also believed that, for life to be worth living or (what was for him a very similar thing) poetry to be worth reading, the words we choose to express the world must constantly change. As he noted in "The Man with the Blue Guitar":

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:Throw away the lights, the definitions,

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:And say of what you see in the dark

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:That it is this or that it is that,

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:But do not use the rotted names.

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Constant change is necessary for two reasons. First, our world can be seen not as a whole, but in parts, and changing parts at that. We live in a world of "pitches and patches"; we are

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:Thinkers without final thoughts

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:In an always incipient cosmos,

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:The way, when we climb a mountain,

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:Vermont throws itself together.

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Second, without change life and poetry would be stagnant, as Stevens depicts heaven as being in his best-known poem, "Sunday Morning": "Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall?" "Death," says Stevens in the same poem, "is the mother of beauty," because only that which changes is beautiful, and death is the last form of change and the guarantor of transiency.

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Stevens was well aware that the intellect is often used to avoid reality rather than to confront it. In "Loneliness in Jersey City" he parodies both religious and scientific analysis with meaningless statements such as "The deer and the dachshund are one" and:

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:The distance between the dark steeple

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:And cobble ten thousand and three

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:Is more than a seven-foot inchworm

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:Could measure by moonlight in June.

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As Stevens notes in the same poem, "The steeples are empty and so are the people": religion and science have tended to find comfortable substitutes for reality rather than describe it accurately.

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The need constantly to re-create reality is what makes Stevens' work so various but at the same time so unified. Along with his flawless ear and constant inventiveness, it is what gives rise to the verbal pyrotechnics of his poetry.

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Although there necessarily cannot be a final destination to Stevens's poetry, some of the greatest moments of his poems come when Stevens catches a glimpse, so to speak, of the secular transcendence that ultimately lies beyond a poem. For example, when in "To an Old Philosopher in Rome", he speaks of "things dark on the horizons of perception", of "the shadow of a shape" that constitutes

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:A light on the candle tearing against the wick

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:To join a hovering excellence, to escape

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:From fire and be part only of that of which

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:Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.

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