California State University, Northridge

Views of Reality in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

A thesis submitted in partial S8.ti.sfaction of the requirements for the Honors Program in

English

by

Ree Bebetu /"

June, 1973

The thesis of Ree Babetu is approved!

California State University, Northridge

·June, 1973

Views of Reality in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

In Wallace Stevens' aesthetic, ;reality is a crucial

term. But defining Stevens' view of reality is difficult,

for much ambiguity resides in the term as he uses it,

F'rank Dogget says that, for Stevens, all reality is a

product of the imagination,! Conversely, Frank Lentricchia

notes that, for Stevens, true reality is that which is

perceived by the senses,2 The problem is apparent. Is

reality an imagined phenomenon, or a sensuous one? For

Stevens, reality can be either of these--or something else

--depending on his view at a given moment, In fact, when

1 Frank Dogget, "Wallace Stevens and the World We

Know," The English ,Journal, XLVIII (October 1959), 365-373.

2 Frank Lentricchia, Jr,, The Gaiety of I~ngua~:

Essay Sill th~ Hadical Poe1_ics of William Butler Ye8ts and

Wallace Stevens (Berkley and Los Angeles& Univ, of

California Press, 1968), p. 125,

he speaks of reality, Stevens is speaking of different

things at different times, Sometimes he designates a

barren reality that is ineluctably present; this is the

reality of "things as they are," Sometimes he points out

the fleeting reality of the immediate moment; this is the

reality o{ things-in-themselves, And it should be noted

that this reality is not the same as "things as they are,"

"Things as they are" are inescapable, whereas things-in­

themselves are elusive, At other times Stevens indicates

a wholly imagined reality, At still other times he

specifies a reality composed of both the imagination and

physical reality. What we have, then, is a fourfold viewt

we have phenomenal rea.li.ty, noumenal reality, imagined

reality, and mixed reality, a marriage of mind and matter.

When we examine Stevens' work, these distinctions become

evident.

Phenomenal reality, the world that impinges on

Stevens' mind, leaves much to be desired. He writes in "The

Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" that "all the great

things have been denied,"] Caught in a naturalistic world,

he feels cut off from an idealistic reality by the discovery

--------------------3 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary ~~elt Essays. ~

Reality and Imagination (New York1 Alfred A. Knopf, 1951),

p. 1-7. Hereafter this

symbol NA,

book will be designated by the

2

that essence and existence, thought and being, are not

identical, The self--which in an idealistic universe

would be considered as a manifestation of spirit--has been

stripped of its transcendency and is but an insignificant

particular, an outcast in a godforsaken universe, The

world i'n which Stevens finds himself bears the heavy impact

of Darwin, Marx, and Freud; it is a barren and hostile

place,

.Now it might be argued that this reality is an imagined

one in the sense that it is the mind that determines the

condition of the world, And it is true that Stevens' view

of phenomenal reality depends on certain unalterable

presuppositions of the mind, If the mind is preconditioned

to expect an ugly and unfriendly world, then the world, in

its first presentation to consciousness, will appear to be

so. But Stevens' imagined reality depends not on pre­

sumption but on mental construction; that is, the mind

takes phenomenal reality and transforms it according to its

own desire. Imagined reality is a deliberate distortion of

"things as they are," as we shall see later,

When Stevens views the reality of "things as they are,"

the world is intolerably uglya The world "is a jungle in

itself , , , everything that makes it up is pretty much of

one color" (NA, p. 26), The world is "blank space"; it is

"complete poverty" (IliA, p. )1), The world

• • • is flat and bare,

.3

There are no shadows. I I I I I • I I I I . I •

The earth is not earth but a stone,4

In short, the world is a dreadful place where "nothing but

the self remains, if that remains" (NA, p, 171),

Confronted with this dismal landscape, Stevens responds

with various emotions. "The Death of a Soldier" is marked

by sadness and regret over brute reality's subjugating

power1

Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops,

When the wind stops and, over the heavens, The clouds go, nevertheless, In their direction.

(CP, p. 97)

The futility here is not an isolated example, In "The

Wind Shifts," the wind--a frequent symbol in Stevens for

unpredictable and uncontrollable naturalistic reality-­

shifts "like a human, heavy and heavy, /Who does not care"

(CP, p, 84), In"Anatomy of Monotony," Stevens says that

we are "deceived" by "the spaciousness and light" of earth,

for everything on earth must die. "And this the spirit

sees and is aggrieved" (CP, p, 108), In "Valley Candle,"

--------------------4 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New Yorkz

Alfred A, Knopf, 1954), pp. 167,173 (hereafter referred

to as CP),

4

the symbolic flame of the poet's spirit is cruelly snuffed

OUt I

My candle burned aJ .. one in an immense valley, Beams of the huge night converged upon it, Until the wind blew,

(CP, p, 51)

At times the "abysmal instruments" of brute nature

are overwhelming. Consider "The Snow Man,"

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boue;hs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow I • I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

And not to think

' . . Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

( c p' pp. 9-1 0 )

If one would attune himself to winter, then he, being

• , , nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,

(Ibid.)

Under these circumstances, one would perceive the "nothing"

of reality in a naturalistic world, The impact of the poem

lies in the horrible realization that the nothingness of

such a world cannot be evaded, for it is impossible to

negate the chaos in existence without negating existence

itself,

The horror of "The Snow Man" becomes abject terror in

"Domination of Black," In this poem "the fire," "the

fallen leaves," "the wi.nd," "the hemlocks," and "the cries

of the peacocks" confront the poet in a scene of impending

5

disaster, Finally, the cosmos itself is drawn into the

terrible vortex&

Out of the window, I saw how the planets gathered Like the leaves themselves Turning in the wind, I saw how the night came, Came striding like the color of the heavy

hemlocks I felt afraid. And I remembered the cry of' the peacocks,

(CP, p, 9)

In "Sunday Morning," a happier poem that contrasts

sharply with the Darwinian frenzy of "Domination of Black,"

Stevens attempts to reconcile himself to the "chaos" of the

imperfect world. The poem seems a celebration of the world

of the senses&

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

(CP, p, 67)

But as we read further, it becomes apparent that Stevens is

simply using new colors to paint the same old scene1

We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable, • • • • • • • • e • • • • • • • • • • And, in the.isolation of the sky, ~t evening, .casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

(CP, P• 70)

The poem might be read as a veritable triumph over brute

6

reality--but is it? The "chaos" is still here, and so are

the "isolation" and the finality of death. The poet can

dress up the world for Sunday morning, but the facts of the

world are nevertheless''inescapable," What Stevens has

done is to take the bitter fruit of phenomenal reality and

call it sweet, And as Lentricchia observes, it is not

altogether convincing,5

For the most part, Stevens' early poems are pervaded

by the grim naturalistic view of reality that we have seen.

This is not to say, however, that this view is limited to

the early poems, for it can be seen in later work too,

As we shall see, Stevens does not really come to terms

with the "sinister machine" until "The Rock," But his

early concern with a world in which "nothing .remains" does

explain why he is compelled to seek a more compatible

reality as he develops, Finding himself in a world where

there is "neither voice nor crested image," "in a world

without heaven to follow," Stevens asks himself the question

"how.to live, what to dOJ" and from his second distinct view

of reality, he discovers that it is enough "just to be there

and just to behold" (CP, pp, 126,127).

This brings us to noumenal reality, a view that tends

to be overlooked by most scholars of Stevens'

--------------------· 5 Frank Lentricchia,Jr,, "Wallace Stevens a The Ironic

Eye," The Yale Review, 55 (1967), 336-337.

7

work,6 In Kantian philosophy the noumenal world can only

be known .intuitively. The thing-in-itself is as it is in

its simple existence; it is something apart from the human

conception of it. Now Stevens does not claim to have

knowledge of the noumenal world, In fact, he is painfully

aware of the vast gulf between subject and object. Still,

from this view, reality is the din,o;-al'l,;-sich, and Stevens'

aim is to make contact with it. This is not an easy order.

It requires that the poet empty his mind of his pre­

suppositions concerning the nature of realtty. He must

meet experience ob ,jecti vely. Further, he must refuse to

transform his experience into conventional human terms;

that is, he must not reconstruct it imaginatively,

Contact with the noumenal world is always the result of

immediate perception, without the "sweeping meanings" that

the mind consciously imposes on experience, Such contact

is alwa.ys fleeting because the mind is always there to

--------------------

8

6 Most critics lump Stevens• various views of reality

together and call it "objective reality," physical reality,"

"brute reality," or simply "reality." Frank Dogget, in his .

essay, "This Invented Worldt Stevens• 'Notes toward a Supreme

Fiction, •" does say tha.t Stevens' "first idea" is comparable

to Kant's thing-in-itself. Dogget's essay was published in

ELH, ( 1961), rpt. i.n Th~ ~ of th~ Mind! Essays on the Poetr,;y

£f. Wal;t.ace Steven~, ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J, Hillis

Miller (Baltimoret The John Hopkins Press, 1965), 1J-28,

9

intrude. And such contact is always joyous because it is

"clear and, except for the eye, without intrusion"

(CP, p. 4-00),

"Martial Cadenza" illustrates the sudden, fleeting,

joyous contact with the ding-an-~1

Only this evening I saw again low in the sky The evening star • , • · • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • It looked apart, Yet it is this that shallmaintain--Itself Is time, apart from any past, apart From any future, the ever-living and being, The ever-breathing and moving, the constant fire,

The present close, the present realized, Not the symbol but that for which the symbol stands, The vivid thing in the air that never changes, Though the air change, Only this evening I saw it

again, At the beginning of winter, and I walked and talked Again, and lived and was again, and breathed again And moved again and flashed again, time flashed again,

(QE_, pp. 237-38)

And we share the encounter in "Of Bright and Blue Birds and

The Gala Sun," when for a moment we are part

Of an element, the ~xactest element for us, In which we pronounce joy like a word of our own,

It is there, being imperfect, and with these things And erudite in happiness, with nothing learned, That we are joyous by ourselves and we think

Without the labor of thought, in that element, (CP, p, 248)

For a moment we have known "a gaiety that is being, not

merely knowing," But it can last for only a moment because

the mind is always there, waiting to impose its own conditions

on things&

Tomorrow when the sun, For all your images, Comes up the sun, bull fire, Your images will have left No shadow of themselves.

. (CP, 178)

The point is that the gulf between self and object is no

sooner bridged than the mind steps in and changes the

picture--''bull fire,''

In "'l'he Man on the Dump," the poet's desire to get rid

of descriptions of reality in order to grasp reality itself

is apparent. Here he gloats over stale images that can be

found on the dump. The sunset is described as a "bouquet"

placed on the horizon by the "moon Blanche," The days are

compared to newspapers "from a press," We are told that

the "bouquets" come daily, like newspapers. Then we are

told that "the sun" and "the moon" both come daily, but

this time they are unadorned by metaphor, which suggests

that real things--the sun and the moon--endure beyond mere

description.

Our sense of reality is immediate, says Stevens&

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green Smacks li.ke fresh water in a can, lilce the sea On a cocoanut.

(CP, p. 202)

And yet we are compelled to capture reality in metaphorss

How many men have copied dew For buttons. how many women have covered them­

selves With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew ,

heads,

10

11

Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew. (CP, p. 202)

But, says Stevens, we soon tire of our stale metaphors--"one

grows to hate these things,"

Then our "man on the dump" tells us that in the fresh­

ness of the present moment, between cast-off descriptions

of the past and new descriptions of the immediate moment,

"one rejects the trash" for reality itself. "One feels the

purifying change"; that is, one feels the change from dull

descriptions of things to clear perceptions of things1

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon, (All its images are in the dump) and you se.e As a man (not like an image of a man), You see the moon rise in the empty sky, (Ibid,)

In this brief moment one embraces things-in-themselves,

Now Stevens knows that the "trash" will soon pile up

again, but that does not diminish his desire for contact, In

"Credences of Summer," he says:

Postpone the anatomy of summer, as The physical pine, the metaphysical pine, Let's see the very thing and nothing else, Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight, Burn everything not part of it to ash.

Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor, Look at it in its essential barrenness And say this, this is the centre that I seek,

(CP, P• 373).

And in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," a similar appeal1

We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object At the exactest point at which it is itself,

(CP, p, 471)

But to desire "pure reality" is one thing; to make

actual contact with it, without transforming it, is quite

another--and much more difficult, We have seen this in

"Add this to Rhetoric" where the metaphor "bull fire" slips

in inadvertently to thwart the search for a "fecund

minimum," We can see it again in "The Sense of the Sleight-

of-Hand lV!an,"

It is a wheel, the rays Around the sun, The wheel The fire eye in the clouds

survives the myths, survives the gods,

(CP, p, 222)

Here even the descriptions of raw facts are encumbered with

metaphors--"wheel" and "eye,"

Contact with noumenal reality is made independent of

the will; it is a fortuitous mating with existence itself.

This reality cannot be conceived by the mind, In fact,

when the mind begins to describe and intellectualize a

fundamental experience, the experience slips away, Man

can never "know" objective reality, and Stevens knows this,

I~ poem after poem he suggests that contact with the ding­

an-sich results from a sensuous awareness of existence, and

not from reason or analysis. For Stevens, noumenal reality

12

is a realm beyond the range of systematic thought; it is a

realm of "being, without a description of to be" (CP, p, 205),

13

Certainly, things-in-themselves constitute a viable

view of reality in Stevens' scheme, From this view, there

is a reality beyond the mind , , •

As when the sun comes rising, when the sea Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. Yet we are shalcen

The~ are ~ thing~ transformed, by them as ~f they were.

(CP, pp. 398-399, italics mine)

These things do not orginate in the mind. They are simply

there to behold. This view, then, provides a joyous release

from the oppressive brute of phenomenal reality. But this

view, as we have already seen, has a major drawback--it is

transitory. The poet no sooner affirms the ,ding-aJl-sich

than, like "the great cat," it "leaps quickly from the fire­

side and is gone" (CP, p. 246), Only briefly can man

confront pure existence, without forming ideas about it,

"We reason about these things with a later reason" (CP, p. 401),

We conceive and imagine the world after the fact of perceiving

the world-in-itself, Hence we create a fiction of the world,

which may be based on perception, but which is elaborated

by thought and imagination.

And so we come to Stevens' imagined reality, a view from

which the mind is free to "think / That the world imagined

is the ultimate good".(CP, p, 524). For Stevens, the

imagination is a powerful force--we have already seen how it

continually hinders the poet's contact with the din~-~ si.ch,

Stevens defines the imagination as "the sum of our faculties"

(NA, p. 61), which includes both reason and sensibility,

This constructive power of the mind alters, transforms,

extends, "metamorphoses'~ the particulars of phenomenal

reality into a significant, orderly pattern. (The imagin­

ation also deals with the particulars of noumenal reality,

but as soon as it does, these particulars cease to be

noumena,) This is not to say that the imagination "invents"

its own world,7 for it does not1 "Things as they are/ Are

c;hanged upon the blue guitar" (CP, p, 165). And the

important word here is changed, In Stevens' view, the

imagination "changes" the phenomenal world, making it

tolerable,

"The Idea of Order at Key West" wi.ll clarify this

notiom

She sang beyond the genius of the sea, The water never formed to mind or voice, Lilce a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

(CP, p, 128)

The sea here symbolizes the unintelligible--"body wholly

7 This is Dogget•s assertion in "The World We Know"

and in "This Invented World," Samuel French Morse makes

a similar assertion in his introduction to Poems·.~

Wall~ Stevens (New York1 Vintage Books, 1959),

P• XIII.

14 .

body"--nothingness of a Darwinian world, "The water never

formed to mind or voice" because man and nature are

alienated in Darwin's world, and in Stevens', Although

she hears the incoherent sounds of the sea, and "even if

what she sang was what she heard," her song is an

15

imaginative rendering of brute reality, "uttered word by word,"

But it is nevertheless a triumph of imagination1

It was her voice that made The slcy acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude, She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang, And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker, Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made •.

(CP 1 pp, 129-130)

It is a triumph of imagination not because the world she made

and mastered was the world of the sea, She did not do that,B

"The sea was merely a place by which she walked to sing," It

is a triumph of imagina.tion because through the power of

imagination she has constructed a version of reality that

enriches the impoveri'shed naturalistic world,

That Stevens' singer has created an "idea of order" is

evident. She has taken "the meaningless plungings of water

and the wind" and translated them into something meaningful

--------------------8 L. S, Dembo claims that Stevens' singer masters the

sea,·but even the poem's title suggests otherwise, See

Conceptions _of Reality in Modern American Poetry (Berkley and Los Angeles1 Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 91,

to the human ear, It is important to note, however, that

the "song and water" are "not medleyed sound," That is,

imagined reality and phenomenal reality, in Stevens' scheme,

are not the same, The world that the singer has constructed

is a world dependent upon thought and imagination, but the

"veritable ocean" remains unaltered, except in the human

conception of it.

Still, there are times when Stevens gets carried away

with the idea of an imagined reality, For example, his

guitarist in "The Man with the Blue Guitar" longs to bring

the world under the control of his imagination, to hold

"the world upon his nose"(CP, p. 178), In "Tea at the

Palaz of Hoon," the poet says:

Iwas the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not from but myself;

16

And there I found myself more truly and more strange, (CP, p, 65)

In "Another Weeping Woman," Stevens praises the imagination:

The magnificent cause of being, The imagination, the one reality In this imagined world,

(CP, p. 25)

And in "The Sense of the Sleight-of-Hand Man," we are told

that we have only to think

• • And

, of a dove with an eye of grenadine pines that are cornets, so i.t occurs.

(Qf, p. 222)

From this view of reality, Stevens sees the imagination

as a liberating force. The fictions produced by the

imagination momentarily assuage the heart and mind that

face a world where it really does not matter whether "Mrs,

Anderson's Swedish baby/ Might well have been German or

Spanish'; (CP, p. 222), as all babies meet the same terrible

fate. It is salutary to transform a world where everything

comes down to "the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X"

(CP, p, 288),

Inseparable from Stevens' imagined reality is the

17

reality of language, for "poetry is words ••• the

imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words"

(NA, p. VIII). "Poetry is words" because words are thoughts,

words are signs of everything that the mind has made of

reality. Just as the mind organizes the world according to

its ovm modes of thought, so language constructs the world

by construing it in symbolic forms. For Stevens, words are

important because in addition to the "changes" effected by

the imagination, things are "changed" by the words used to

refer to them. For example, In "Certain Phenomena of Sound,"

Sister Eulalia is created of her namea

You were created of your na.me, the word Is that of which you were the personage. There is no life except in the word of it.

(CP, P• 287)

And.in "The Pure Good of Theory"a

He woke in a metaphor1 this was

A metamorphosis of paradise, (CP,p. 331)

Stevens even hopes that imaginative language can lead

to a new reality, Metaphors can construct so many'potential

seemings," as we are told in "Description without Place,"

18

A poet's metaphors might create an idea in terms of which

everything in the universe would receive its full explanation

and reason1

There might be, a change immenser than A poet's metaphors in which being would

Come true, a point in the fire of music where Dazzle yields to a clarity and we observe,

And observing is completing and we are content In a world that shrinks to an immediate whole,

(CP, p, 341)

But when we come right down to the bare facts, imaginative

language, though powerful, should not be overestimated; for

however enticing such an idea is, Stevens knows that it is

a"concept only possible" (CP, p, 345).

And since we are down to the bare facts, the reality of

the imagination should not be overestimated either, Even

in poems that praise it, we can see the imagination's

limitation. In this connection, consider "Final Soliloquy

of the Interior Paramour," This poem celebrates the world

of the imagination, yet it reveals its weaknesses at the

same_time. Here the poet says that we cling to the

imagination because it is the only thing that is not

indifferent in this indifferent world, For this reason we

"wrap" our "poor" selves in the idea that "the world

imagined is the ultimate good," Having done so, we feel a

sense of harmony and "order," and

We say that God and the imagination are one • • • (CP, P• 524)

But since the imagination i.s a product of the mind, it has

19

"its vi ta.l boundary in the mind." And outside that boundary,

we are still keenly aw~.re of the "slovenly wilderness" of

brute reality,

We have seen three well-defined views of reali.ty,in

Stevens' system, and none provi.cl.esreal satisfaction!

phrmomenal real:i. ty is intolera.ble 1 noumenal reality ir-:

eJ.usiver imagined reality is bounded by the mind, But from

Stevens' final view, all problems disappear, In the mixed

reality of "The Rock•" mind and matter are happily mar:r.ied

in a reality that provides both sa.tisfaction and fulfil1ment.

In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," Stevens

defines poetry as the "interdependence of the imagination

and reality as equals" (NA, p, 27), Within the same essay,

he makes it clear that the "reality" here refers to

physical or phenomenal reality, Stevens bases his whole

theory of art on this interdependence formula, But we

have not seen any interdependence between the imagination

and reality in his poems. In fact, most of hi.s poemsare

based on a constant struggle between the imagination and

reality. Further, the struggle between the two is one in

which neither side wins. If the imagination gains a

momentary victory, then at the next turn, reality takes it

away. But the goal Stevens sets for himself is evident as

early as "The Comedian as the Letter C"s to provide

The liaison, the blissful liaison, Between himself and his environment.

(CP, p. 34)

And in "The Man with the Blue Guitar," the imagination and

reality battle throughout the poem for the possession of

the guitar. There is no interdependence of the two, but

their wedding is clearly foreshadowed when Stevens'

guitarist sayss

That I may reduce the monster to Myself, and then may be my self

In face of the monster, be more than part Of it, more than the monstrous player of

One of its monstrous lutes, not be Alone, But reduce the monster and be

Two things, the two together as one, And play of the monster and of myself.

(CP, P• 175)

But however badly Stevens wishes to marry the

imagination to the reality of the physical world, he does

not actually accomplish this goal until late in his

development. It is not until he writes his late poem "The

Rock" that he is able to establish unity in his divided

world. But "The Rock" envisions a reality that is truly

20

21

based on "an interdependence of the imagination and reality."

In this poem, Stevens at last brings the "two together as

onee 11

The poet begins by considering his past life, which,

since it no longer exists, seems an illusions

It is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air,

Regard the freedom of seventy ;,rears ago, It is no longer air.

(£f., p. 525)

Everything :i.s gone. The poet stands in "rigid emptiness,"

as he contemplates the devastations that the rock has

brought, So great is his sense of loss that even his

memories of the past seem like nothing, false "inventions"&

"It is not to be believed,"

Yet as he continues to ponder, he convinces himself

that this "illusion" was once a "vi tal" detail ("a particular

of being") of the continuity of present life1 and that the

past, therefore, is a part of total existence in the "gross

universe," But although he has convinced himself that the

barren rock of reality has been fructified by the vital

detail of existence, he still has not bridged the gulf

between man and nature&

It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves, We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves • • •

(CP, P• 526)

For Stevens, the "cure" for the division between man

and nature, imagination and reality, results from a poetry

that is identical with the processes of nature, The

"barrenness" of the rock is covered by the "leaves" of the

poet's consciousness--his poem. Further, the cure takes

on the aspect of "blessedness," when the leaves brealc into

"bud," into "bloom," and bear "fruit," and man then eats

of "the incipient colorings/ Of their fresh culls , , , ,"

Thus the rock signifies the incarnation of the imagination

and reality&

The fiction of the leaves is the icon

Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness, And the icon is the man, (CP, p, 527)

And so the division between man and nature "exists no

more," for as nature gives its fruit to man, so the images

of the poem proliferate and cover the rock, As the seasons

of nature bestow their good things on man, so poems make

reality endurable, Clearly, poems are "more than leaves

that cover the barren rock"1

They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout, New senses in the engendering of sense, The desire to be at an end of distances,

The body quickened and the mind in root, (CP, p. 527)

Hence man himself becomes part of nature, his spirit

growing as things in nature grow. The imagination and

reality now exist inseparably in a vital, "equal"

22

interdependency, The imagination, through the poem, "makes

meanings of the rock," And "this is the cure/ Of the

leaves and of the ground and of ourselves."

Harmony and order have been established in the mixed

reality of "The Rock," From this view, Stevens is even

able to come to terms with the brute fact of deatht

The rock is the gray particular of man's life, The stone from which he rises up, up--and ho,

23

The step to the bleaker depths of his descent • , , (CP,p, 528)

Death still exists--there is no cure for it. But to think

of it as a descent down steps of the earth is to exorcise

death of its horror. Certainly, "The Rock" reflects none

of the terror that the realization of death arouses in a

poem like "Domination of Black," for example, Since, from

this view, the rock represents the whole of existence, both

real and imagined, death is no more than a part of the

harmonious whole, The last line of the poem reveals how

completely Stevens has fused reality and imagination,

Death, the hardest fact of reality, becomes "night's hymn

of the rock," which is realized in a most intense state

of the imagination, "as in a vivid sleep."

Earlier I stated that in Stevens' aesthetic the term

reality is ambiguous. Contrary to the assertions of many

critics, Stevens' view of reality does not consist of a

single point of view. Reality, for Stevens, cannot be

summed up as wholly imagined or totally sensuous, Neither

can it be summed up as simply matter, as Doris Elder has

argued,9 It is evident that four distinct views are

subsumed under the term reality in Stevens' work; for he

is clearly referring to different realities at different

times,

We have seen that from Stevens' first perspective,

reality is identical with the nineteenth-century natural­

istic world view, Since the poet has subscribed to this

view, the world that he receives, by the very act of

consciousness, is despiritualized ardterrifying. Because

this is so, Stevens longs for a more satisfying world,

From his second perspective, he sees reality as things­

in-themselves, This is a realm of "pure reality," which

is immensely satisfying, but which, as we have seen, is

fleeting, From the poet's third perspective, reality is

seen as an imagined product where "the total artifice

reveals itself/ As the total reality" (NA, p, 87). But

however great his claims for the imagination are, Stevens

knows that it can provide only "the idea of order," and

that, in the face of the alien, dominating.flux of brute

nature, it is as impotent as the jar that "did not give of

bird or bush," as Stevens says in "Anecdote of the

9 Doris L. Elder, "The Meaning of Wallace Stevens'

Two Themes," Th~ gritical Quarterl;y:, II, ed, A, E. Dison and

C, B, Cox (Oxford' Oxford Univ, Press, 1969), 181-190,

2/.j.

Jar" (CP, p, 76), From his final perspective, Stevens

sees reality as a happy marriage between mind and matter,

This reality is completely satisfying, even in the

knowledge of ultimate death,

Although I have discussed each reality in Stevens'

scheme separately, I do not mean to imply that the poems

in Coll~!Q.Q Pcems fall into clear-cut groups, I have

already said that Stevens' naturalistic world view can be

seen in early as well as late work. The same is true of

his noumenal world view and of his imagined world view,

Yet there is a heavy emphasis on the barren reality of

the phenomenal world in the early poems, and we have seen

that the marriage of the imagination and reality does not

take place tmtil quite late. From this we can conclude

that it has not been easy for Stevens to move from the

Darwinian primordial slime to the exalted state where

"his self and the sun are one" (CP, p • .532), And even if

the move is only a temporary "fluctuation in reality," it

is nevertheless a monumental achievement,

25

Bibliography

Dembo, L. S. , Conception!?. 9f Reali_!;_y in Modern Americ2.n Poetry. Berkley and Los Angeles1 Uni~of California Pr"ilss, 1966.

Dogget, Frank, "This Invented World1 Stevens' 'Notes toward a Suprem<l Fiction.'" The Act o:f_ th~ Mil}_<;! I Essaytl_ _on ~h~ !_'oet!:Y s>.f Walla~~ Stevens. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J, Hillis Miller. Baltimoret The John Hopkins Press, 1965.

Dogget, Frank. "Wallace Stevens and the World We Know." The English Journal, XLVIII October 1959, PP• 365-373.

Elder, Doris, I.. "The Meaning of Wallace Stevens' 'l'wo Themes." The Cr?.,ti<?.~:J.: Quarterly. Ed. A, E, Dison and c. B. Cox, Oxf'ordt Oxford Univ, Press, 1969. n; 181-190.

Lentricchia, Frank, Jr. The Gaiety of ~anguage: the Radical Poetics of William Butler Yeats Wailace--Stevrms:-BerkleyancCLos -Angeles 1 CaJ.Lf'ornla Press, 1968,

Essay on and lTnTv. of

Lentricchia, Franl,, Jr. "Wallace Stevens• The Ironic Eye." The Yale. Eeview 55 (1967), 336-353.

Poems_ J:l.;'L Wal:j.ace Stevens. Ed. Samuel French Morse, New York1 Vintage Books, 1959.

Stevens, Wa.llace. The Collected l?O.~'i· New York1 Alfred A, Knopf, 1954-.--

Stevens, Wallace. The Nece_ssa.ry Ang§!},l Essays Qll Reali_!y and Imagina_tion7 New York1 Alfred A. Knopf, 195L

26