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Surpassing and Resembling: Approximation and Difference between Imagination and Reality in Wallace Stevens’ The Rock

Critics acknowledge that the primary theme in the works of Wallace Stevens is the relationship between imagination and reality. However, there remains more to contribute to the subject. In general, idealistic critics accentuate that Stevens seeks to evade “reality pressure” and to fabricate an interior world or a supreme and transcendental-like fiction, and substitute, it for the real world. However, some critics appreciate Stevens’ pursuit of reality itself especially in his later period; they also fail to notice that he allows some leeway within reality that brings forth imagination and cognizance. In reality, the relationship between the two is more complicated than the existing perspectives as shown in his later poetry collection, The Rock, which ruminates over the scenery of autumn, winter and early spring. Stevens first observes that the extreme reality of autumn and winter which contains devastation, atrophy, and indigence, even annihilates supreme imagination: thus, “the effete vocabulary of summer no longer says anything.” However, the privation as a sort of genuine nakedness makes us return to “a plain sense of things,” and even sublimates us in an experience of the reception of a huge profundity. Another sublime element in the winter landscape is how frozen winter seems to be pensively contemplating things without any subjectivity, even to the extent of mechanical operation. The fixed meditation of nature nonetheless brings around another form of nature, consciousness of the subjects. The contemplative subject like a cosmic being becomes more detached from the outer world as if dominating this world when he is immersed in imagination, composition, and languages. The poetic subject continues to be allured by a syllable without any meaning and yearns for the import of a syllable adding “the whole vocabulary of the South” to the northern void. The fertile poetic world serves to emit the “first light” of the winter evening and is exalted to the ultimate good. The imagination in winter is not only a sublime essence but also a desire and momentum towards spring. Poetry as an icon can be a realization of the illusion of spring and prepare for a future “thousand things.” However, purgation is necessary for the renewal of spring; thus, the winter is “washed away” when Ulysses approaches Penelope. But imagination and purification remain insufficient for perfecting real spring; Stevens confirms the material spring above human involvement in the “propelling force” of the “mere flowing” of a river in local Connecticut and in the separate insistence of exterior things of the sunrise and the cry of a thrush in early spring.