When I read Wallace Stevens, I knew that he was, to put it dramatically, what I had been struggling with my entire life. The profusion of images in his poetry made no sense to me, but they were beautiful... in the same way, I have been breathing life and not been able to make complete sense of it. Some things were made to be enjoyed, not analysed, and Stevens's poetry is at the top of this list for me.

Stevens lived from 1879-1955. He was an insurance lawyer, and never a "professional" poet. All the more amazing then are his creations, composed during his afternoon lunch breaks and walks. He wrote of "Bright & Blue Birds & the Gala Sun" and "The Pure Good of Theory". His poetry is sensual yet it seems the epitome of intellectuality at the same time, simply because it is so ungraspable. All his life, I believe Stevens struggled with the tension between reality and fiction -- he is often branded a fiercely anti-social poet, because issues of racism, war and depression seldom take explicit form in his poetry. But he is no less a social poet for this omission, which is not really an omission.

Stevens's primary concern was with a "supreme fiction", and we have to understand this if we are to come closer to understanding his poetry at all. (He wrote a manifesto, "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction", as a matter of fact.) Most of his poems are about the theory of poetry, and are centered around preserving the integrity and purity of this theory. "The Snow Man" is a wonderful poem that illustrates this principle. It incorporates reality in the attainment of a clarity of thought -- "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Things remain "supremely true" to themselves in "Re-statement of Romance". Yet, it is in trying to reach this ideal of supremacy that one has to concern oneself with the present: in "Mozart, 1935", Stevens exhorts the poet to "play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cachinnation."

I may sound like I am writing a paper (and this may be the effect of me having done such a thing just 2 hours ago on Stevens himself, no less) but I believe these principles of Stevens to be important to the interpretation of his poetry. As my professor said, one has to approach Stevens with some tools. While he can never be boxed in one category, whether it be cubism, naturalism, symbolism, etc. (movements he was interested in), it would help to know how he was influenced by these trends. When we come to understand that Stevens is about the power of imagination *in relation to* reality, we are able to read him in more complex ways.

Frankly speaking, Stevens is not to everyone's tastes, and many people have come away from reading his poetry feeling dazed and confused. This was exactly what I felt when I read "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts". I put BIG question marks next to the poem. What can one make of a rabbit that "becomes a self that fills the four corners of night" while "the red cat hides away in the fur-light / And there [the rabbit is] humped high, humped up"? It helps to read his poems again, and again (this repetitive reading is useful for any poet), till you come to, if not an intellectual understanding, at least, an aesthetic one. You see the rabbit growing menacingly bigger in its imagination, dwarfing the cat, which turns from "red tongue, green mind" to a green bug.

Stevens's poetry is beautiful, but you have to have the key to unlock this beauty, to let it wash over you. Many people find peace in his poetry, which is social insofar that it offers a respite for those who are weary of clearly delineated "reality".



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