Wallace Stevens in his later poetry descends into reality, seeking its being in its moment of revelation. In Stevens’s view, it is only when the poet seeks to experience rather than capture the reality that it reveals its being and that the poet perceives unmediatedly what his poetry could not fantom. If it does take place, the experience seems more a revelation rather than creation. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” revising the earlier articulation of his poetics through the optics of the divide between mind and world, approaches the relation of poetic language to reality as the problem of figuring and marking otherness of the first Idea, the effect that its disappearance produces in poetry. Indeed, supreme fiction and its attributes of abstractness, changingness, and pleasure in “Notes” are tied to Stevens’s poetic of revelation that dwells in the simultaneous revelation and disappearance of ‘being of reality.’ As the first part of “Notes” shows, the first Idea as being of reality, which reveals itself only in a fleeting and limited way, enters into “its late plural” or into the words of the poetic text. The tracks of the first Idea are thus doubly covered and obliterated first by its own limited revelation and then by its metaphoric transfer into the words and entities: the revelation of the first Idea implies its necessary slippage away from the human faculty of knowledge and then away from its metaphoric transfer into words. In the second part, change unfolding in the first Idea functions as the rupturing otherness that produces words and their configurations. This rupture itself and its disappearance become the poem “immenser than / A poet’s metaphors.” The third part explores the radical rearticulation of the beautiful that does not exist relative to sensual and rational pleasure and as its object but belongs to the advent of truth, truth’s taking of its place. It is this sensation of discovery of the first Idea’s unfolding into words that “gives pleasure.”
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