Imagination, Subjectivity, and Wallace Stevens's “Supreme Fictions”

This paper tries to explore Wallace Stevens's poetic treatment of subjectivity. Being concerned with the Romantic issue of the imagination, Stevens has made various attempts at poeticizing the intricate interactions of mind, reality, and fiction involved in the process of writing. For some critics, these attempts, addressing the Romantic construction of imagination, are so encumbered by the metaphysics of the subject embedded in Romanticism that they are, ultimately, articulating a subjectivist, even solipsistic, poetics. This paper argues that Stevens's works actually put the metaphysics of the subject at stake. Propounding the idea of poetry as "supreme fictions," Stevens makes further explorations into the issue of imagination and exposes the subject as fictive construction.