THE WORLD THAT SPEAKS: WALLACE STEVENS' FLUENT MUNDO

Recent criticism of Wallace Stevens' poetry tends increasingly toward the idea that the later Stevens wants to turn away from the imagination--to eliminate subjective distortion for the sake of a pure experience of the world, seen to consist either in an unobscured view of objective reality or in a "glimpse of being" brought about by a rapid movement between subjective and objective poles and yielding an ontological sense of reality. This study responds to such criticism by demonstrating that while the later poetry expresses a desire for commonplace reality, it also holds that for mankind there is no reality without the mind's ordering faculty. Further, I show that the subject/object relation is for Stevens a stable and unbroken interdependence and that Stevens' "being" is not an ontological notion but rather the imaginatively-gilded "created world." With particular attention to the view of Stevens as ontologist, the study analyzes currently popular Heideggerian interpretations of the poetry, concluding that for all Heidegger's interest in language and in the poet as the one who lets "Being" shine forth, his idea of man as the "shepherd of Being" is at odds with Stevens' emphasis on created "fictions" as the definitive force in our relation to the world. In an extended discussion of Nietzschean philosophy, I show how such fictions arise as a conscious response to the "decreated" (Stevens' term) condition of the modern world. And through Ernst Cassirer's phenomenology, I demonstrate the philosophical underpinnings for Stevens' notion of an aesthetic which would "suffice" in the face of contemporary disillusionment. In this vein Stevens' male and female figures are redefined as representations not simply of imagination and reality but as one's "idea" (that which one believes) and one's sense of the world (that which one can love). These complementary halves "marry," forming the created world--the "fluent mundo."...