Wallace Stevens and the idea of language

Wallace Stevens wrote poetry about the act of writing poetry. At the heart of the problematic of Stevens' poetry on poetry lies language as a decreative and re-creative force which expresses the relationship between the imagination and reality. In poetry, Stevens wanted to "recreate" a language which could render changing, chaotic reality in all its complexity and disclose a wholeness in experience which ordinary awareness does not warrant—to re-create what the religious philosopher Mircea Eliade has called the "mythical style of life." This study examines Stevens' prose to establish the decreative and re-creative theory of language and metaphor and to analyze the poems about poetry to discover how Stevens used language as metaphor and theme.

Language is an arbitrary, humanly created sign system which is not isomorphic with the world. Yet Stevens desired a language for what he called "cosmic poetry" to balance reality with imagination. In saying "Words are everything else in the world," Stevens suggested that, as the arbitrator between imagination, which is part of us, and reality, which is separate, unknowable, and violent, language is all we have. But because language is an isomorphic system, it cannot mirror reality thoroughly or completely, but tends to fix reality, just as definitions tend to fix abstractions. The solutions is Stevens' re-created secret language of poetry. He searched for ways to structure language so that it reflected the structure and order of the world, or he wrote poetry about structuring language to balance reality with imagination.

Ironically, the making of poetry becomes a destructive act because it attempts to tear down with words man's categorization of reality as it is usually expressed in words. For Stevens, the conceptual view of reality creates an order which does not exist in reality and which, consequently, must be destroyed. His poetry, therefore, is aimed at making his readers "connoisseurs of chaos." Interested in a poetry that defies man to categorize reality simply, Stevens attempted to create a discontinuity with categorization so that readers could see the world in a fresh way.