المستخلص: |
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is greatest modem American poet, with individualistic views, who is persistently concerned with reconciling reality with the imagination, and could never really talk of one without the other, for they are inseparable. Stevens firmly believes that all material existence has its extension in the imagination, and only then can it truly exist. In his hands, poetry, like science, has become more specialized, recording the transformation of reality by the imagination. Stevens finds the purpose of poetry in the satisfaction of life. Hence he is celebrated for one of the twentieth-century most significant cultural dogmas: Poetry is the Supreme Fiction, that is the poetry of sublimity and quest for the infinite, for truth, and for certitude. Stevens overlays his poetry with a heavily philosophical intent. His poems are meant for the elite; they are thought of as provoking and demanding in nature, and only intellectuals can probe into their meaning and enjoy them. The present study attempts to examine Stevens’ poetic output for evidence of elucidating the process of poetic transformation, and exposing his assertions regarding the relation of the imagination to reality, the relation of the poet to his art and environment, and the problem of belief and humanism. The study describes the nature of Stevens’ aestheticism; his desire for beauty and his sense of death and nothingness. It examines the elegance of Stevens’ poetry as apparent in the eloquence of his language, and it proposes to offer explanations of the essential problematic in his thought. It hopes to provide a more fruitful mode of approach to this prolific poet-critic.
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