Wallace Stevens` Supreme Fiction

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One significant feature of the modernist poetics is its incessant exploration of literary form and technique as well as content. It is regarded as the effort to cope with the bewildering new reality of the modern society since World War I. Wallace Stevens could not be free from the modernists` impulse to write new poems. For his whole poetic career was situated in between the acceptance of the naturalistic fact and the nostalgia for the romantic idealism. In that context, Stevens` poetic position appears quite vulnerable: He says resolutely, "everything like a firm grasp of reality is eliminated from the aesthetic field."1) Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, quoted in Raman Selden ed., The Theory of Criticism: From Plato to the Present (London: Longman, 1988) 38. Hereafter cited as NA.
He puts it furthur that "The poetic process is psychologically an escapist process" (NA 38). For the activities of writing and reading poems give us the satisfying illusion in language against "the pressure of reality."

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In fact, all the poems of Stevens are engaged, to a degree, in building up the new poetic authority which is relevent to his own time.

Then the theatre was changed
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. . . . . . . . . . .2) Wallace Stevens, "Of Modern Poetry," Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1984) 239-40. Furthur citation of the poems of Stevens refer to this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.



There is no doubt that "the theatre" of the modernist is different from those of the romantist and of the naturalist, much more after the horrible war. Stevens suggests that the poet`s role is "to help people to live their lives" by making his imagination theirs (NA 37). The quest for the poetic authority in the "new stage" of Stevens` own time is presented as the seeking process of the "supreme fiction." The supreme fiction is the world to which the poet gives life and to which we turn incessantly (NA 38). For the formation of a supreme fiction, some doctrines are required: "It must be abstract"; "It must change"; "It must give pleasure." In this essay, I will try to show the shaping of the supreme fiction - the fiction of self and a world - and the function of language and metaphor in the poetry of Stevens.

참고자료

· Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate.
· Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1976.
· Gelpi, Albert. Wallace Stevens: the Poetics of Modernism.
· Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
· ___, ed. A Coherence of Splendor: the American Poetic
· Renaissance. 1910-1950. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
· 1987.
· Lentricchia, Frank. "Patriarchy against Itself - The Young
· Manhood of Wallace Stevens." Critical Inquiry (1987):
· 742-86.
· ___ . The Gaiety of Language: An Essay on the Radical
· Poetics of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Berkeley:
· Univ. of California P, 1968.
· Pease, Donald. "Critical Response I: Patriarchy,
· Lentricchia, and Male Feminization." Critical Inquiry
· (1988): 379-413.
· Selden, Raman, ed. The Theory of Criticism: From Plato To
· The Present. London: Longman, 1988.
· Shaviro, Steven. "`That Which is Always Beginning`:
· Stevens`s Poetry of Affirmation." PMLA 100 (1985):
· 220-33.
· Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems.
· London: Faber and Faber, 1984.