Wallace Stevens’ Poetic Realism: The Only Possible Redemption

Wallace Stevens claimed that his poetry serves “realism”, but, as he well knew, his poetry is not merely the product of a lively and vivid imagination, but it also at many points appears fantastically unreal or even surreal, in humor and in more serious matters not bound to common sense realities. In what sense, then, can his poetic works be regarded as “realism”? I argue that they exemplify what I call “poetic realism”: a realism that uses various rhetorical devices, such as exaggeration, fanciful humor, metaphor, resemblance, and word-play, in order to adumbrate a deeper truth, a deeper reality that is often unacknowledged or even repressed. His “realism” serves a truth that is revealing—not the truth that prevails. It also is a “realism” that recognizes multiple perspectives, multiple truths. Perhaps the snow is not just white; it is also turning black, attuned to the menacing storm in the sky—or it is perhaps purple, surrounding a man with a monarch’s boundless ego. Although we can read and enjoy the poetry purely for its sensuous qualities and aesthetic construction, we can also learn much if we read it as narratives that bear not only on the formal conditions of ethical life, such as the multiplicity of perspectives, the illusory forms of truth, the non-sense in sense, and the ambiguities in meaning, but also on ethical life itself: anguishing existential questions, treacheries of the heart, and the complexities that can be involved in bringing to language feelings of friendship, experiences of freedom, and the need for meaning.