Wally Steven’s Supreme Fiction
Throughout his poetic career Wallace Stevens was troubled by one disturbing question. What are we supposed to do in an era where our old notions of religion no longer suffice? Slowly losing his Christian beliefs, he wanted to know what to rely on to dictate righteousness, and what we should think of our world. To explain this mystery, he theorized that our world is what we imagine it to be. Therefore within our imagination lies what we define as omnipotent.
Steven’s poetry interacts between imagination and reality, as well as the relationship between consciousness and the world. He believed that imagination and consciousness are not synonymous concepts and that reality is not equal to the world as it exists outside our minds. Furthermore, he described reality to be a product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Due to the fact that reality is constantly changing we have to attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world. As Stevens defines it, reality is an activity not a static object. We approach reality with a gradual understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a view through an active exercise of the imagination.
The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real. In his poem “Anecdote of a Jar” we can see just that. Within his own imagination he sees this jar as being the supreme object everything else revolves around. He gives something so meaningless as a jar; the role divinity once took in society.
Stevens concludes that god is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of god may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that...
View Full Essay