Making It New: 1900–1945 381circumstances. Our consciousnesses are not simply blank pieces of paper on
which the world writes its messages, not just mirrors that reflect our environment;
rather, they are lamps, active, creative things which illuminate that environment,
helping to give it form and perspective and so making it adequate, even if only
temporarily, to ordinary human desires. “The imagination,” declared Stevens,
echoing William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “is the power of the mind over
the possibilities of things,” “like light, it adds nothing, except itself.” In a way, Stevens
argued, our world is always an imagined one because our senses start to arrange
things almost as soon as they perceive them, and whenever we think about experience
we begin to structure it according to some law – such as the scientific law of cause
and effect. We start to “read” and interpret the world in the same manner that,
instinctively, we read and interpret a written text. For Stevens, however, the supreme
example of this shaping, structuring capacity was the artistic imagination: those
acts of the mind whereby people attempt quite consciously to give significance to
life – to devise some moral or aesthetic order, however fragile or provisional, which
can give coherence and a sense of purpose to things. This kind of order was what
Stevens called a “supreme fiction,” and for him, as for Coleridge, the prime creator
of such fictions was the poet. The poet, according to Stevens, strives for a “precise
equilibrium” between the mind and its environment at any given moment in time;
and then creates a fiction which is at once true to our experience of the world and
true to our need for value and meaning.
It is worth emphasizing that, as Stevens perceived it, the imaginative faculty does
not so much impose designs on the world as discover designs inherent in it. And it is
also worth adding that he saw the act of the imagination as a continuous, theoretically
unending one – that he insisted on the primacy of change. We are always altering,
Stevens believed, and our given circumstances alter too, and the fictive world created
out of the synthesis or union of the two must invariably respond to this. We must be
reassessing our personal needs and given circumstances continually so as to devise
new ideas which do full justice to the dynamic nature of both mind and world; and
the poet, in turn, must be writing new poems, new fictions all the time so as to pay
his tribute to the metamorphic nature of things. Stevens’s analogue for this process
was the seasons, with winter seen as the bare, icy reality void of all fictive covering
(“The Snow Man” (1923)); spring as the moment when the imagination and
the world meet together, “embrace / and forth the particulars of rapture come”
(Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, II, iv); summer as the period of fruition when the
marriage between the desires of the mind and the things of the world is complete
and harmonious (“Credences of Summer” (1947)); and autumn as the moment
when the fiction no longer suffices because the imagination that created it, and the
world it was created for, have altered, requiring new fictions, fresh identities and
relationships (“The Death of a Soldier” (1923)). As this rather bare outline indicates,
perhaps, the imagery of sexual congress and conflict mingles with that of natural
growth and decay to describe what Stevens, in one of his poems, termed the
imagination’s “ancient cycle.” Mind and world, “flesh and air,” male and female: life
is seen as a marriage of opposites (“Life is Motion” (1923)). Joy, or a sense ofGGray_c04.indd 381ray_c 04 .indd 381 8 8/1/2011 7:53:52 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 52 AM