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Symbolist Elements in Wallace Stevens’ Poetry

Wallace Stevens’ notion of poetry had been deeply rooted in the traditionally transmitted notion of poetry, especially in the matrix of symbolist lyricism. When Stevens says that the value of the poem depends on expression, he traces the origin of poetic meaning back to romantic poetry in which the term ‘expression’ was often referred to as one of the most fundamental keynote ideas of poetry. ‘Expression’ means to Stevens a set of symbolic meanings that are induced by the creative mind or by the imagination. This notion of ‘expression’ along with the imagination not only becomes the very genesis of poetic meaning in symbolist poetry but becomes one of the most pivotal elements that constitute both Stevens’ poetry and poetic theory. Among the major American poets of the High Modernist period Stevens most emphatically argued for the primacy of the imagination and, at the basis of his understanding of the imagination there lies his idea that the primary mode and the primary material of poetic thought and expression are symbols. And the quality of Stevens’ poetry and poetic theory discloses his allegiances to symbolist weltanschauung.