The Creation of Reality through Imagination in Wallace Stevens' Poetry

Abstract

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was an American modernist poet. He spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford Insurance Company in Connecticut. The present study traces the relationship between imagination and reality in his poetry and shows how the poet is fully satisfied with this world. To him, reality may be factual or invented. However, he is a critic of factual reality because it has neither meaning nor content. Hence, Stevens considers it pointless to limit oneself to factual reality. Reality, he believes, is an abstraction with many perspective possibilities, and he struggles to create original perspectives out of it. He aims at creating a new modern reality in his poetry. Stevens sees poetry as an arena of heightened powers, continually creates cognitive depictions of the world. These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words.