The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens - Cambridge Univer...

How should one approach Stevens' poetry? As with any poet, the first step is to enjoy him, to take pleasure in Stevens' exquisite language, subtle rhythms, arresting images, surprise effects, and distinctive sounds. We have become a little too insistent about meaning in poetry, as if a poem were no more than a vehicle for ideas. We should be mindful of Stevens' observation that “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have”

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The second step in approaching Stevens' poetry is to concede that he, like Proteus, is slippery. He will not be fixed. If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our response to it are in constant flux.

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One might say these instances represent the poles of Stevens' notorious “reality-imagination complex” (L 792), but they do not yield a dialectic, as if there were a synthesis or resolution to the continual process of adjustment. Rather, they constitute discrete moments in a never-ending cycle in the poet's (and in our) response to reality. Change is the essence of poetry for Stevens because change is the essence of life.

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The third step, and perhaps the key adjustment readers must make when approaching Stevens, is to acknowledge that his poems are not about a subject so much as they are about the poetry of the subject, about the way the subject develops through language.

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