Seasons In Wallace Stevens' Poetry

Wallace Stevens is one of the five giant poets in American literature history, who has also been well-known as a poets'poet in the twentieth century. The poetry of Stevens concerns about abundant metaphysical and philosophical ideas that many critics have analyzed from the perspective of deconstruction, Chinese culture's influence and so on. The thesis, by analyzing Wallace Stevens'poetry related to seasons, tries to discuss how Stevens decreates and recreates reality through imagination in a time with loss of faith and explores the interior relation between human life and seasons and dig out Stevens'metaphysical ideas about seasons.The thesis consists of six parts. Introduction explains the life experience of the poet and his unique interest in seasons, thus producing a lot of seasonal poems. The following four chapters is a paralleled structure, each relating a season. Chapter One reflects nothingness of winter through analysis of color image and sound image in Stevens'poetry. Nothingness here is not non-existence but exploration of conceptual reality using ignorant eye and it's also the objective world without subjectivity. Chapter two elucidates spring as beginning based on plant image and time. Spring is also the beginning of decreating reality applying imagination. Stevens deconstructs the reality for the sake of reconstructing the broken reality. Chapter three reflects the creation of summer through rhythm and color image. In this period, human beings,with more and more abundant imagination, can understand the world more precisely. Stevens actively participate in the world to recreate reality. Chapter four elucidates autumn as supreme fiction through certain sentence structure and sound image. In this period, Stevens continually seeks for three principles of Supreme Fiction---it must be abstract; it must change; it must give pleasure, which becomes his final pursuit.The thesis thus concludes that Stevens, as the key poet in the 20th century of America, has been an excellent explorer who has shown a more splendid reality. Seasonal Poetry has shown the existence of human from nothingness to plurality and the final pursuit of Supreme Fiction, which is a powerful illustration of "help people to live their lives". He places himself in the cycle of nature, continually perceiving the change of four seasons and regarding the cycle of four seasons as the cycle of human life. Through his seasonal poetry, he tells people life has no beginning and no ending and it is just like the four seasons constantly changing.