Imagination in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens Essay example

What are â€Å"Castratos of moon-mash?† Who are these seemingly real but only partially embodied figures, which Wallace Stevens mentions almost in passing at line three in his poem, â€Å"Men Made Out of Words.† As readers, how are we to understand this short ambivalent phrase, which while confounding us appears to answer the question raised in the previous two lines: â€Å"What should we be without the sexual myth, / The human revery or the poem of death† (1-2). Stevens does not elaborate on the image of the moon-mashed castratos he has just presented, but instead using a hyphen formulates and finishes the relatively short ten-line poem. One can argue that this second part of the poem could even be a separate strophe from the lines already noted,†¦show more content†¦Stevens makes this fact apparent from the beginning of the poem, when he notes not only â€Å"human revery† but also â€Å"the sexual myth† and the â€Å"poem of death† (1). Therefore, these defined formulations are only categories of a greater whole, which remains unmentioned in the poem. In deliberating on Stevens’s poems, we can come to understand this encompassing whole as the imagination, which impels an individual to make â€Å"eccentric propositions† about his or her life and fate (4-5, 10). In his essay, Imagination as Value, Stevens reminds us that â€Å"the imagination is the power of the mind over the possibilities of things [†¦] it is the source not of a single value but of as many values as can reside in the possibilities of things† (136). With these words in mind and from what we have already noted in â€Å"Men Made Out of Words,† we can assert that the â€Å"possibilities of things,† mentioned in the essay, are the same as the reveries, poems, and myths, hinted at in the poem; however, one needs to clarify the difference between the ‘possibilities of things’ and the ‘thingsà ¢â‚¬â„¢ themselves. For Stevens, the imagination is ‘metaphysical’ or something which resides in the abstract but at the time it serves as â€Å"the only clue to reality [i.e. things]† (137); therefore it is through the imagination that reality derives its possibilities i.e. its myths, reveries, and poems. In Stevens argument, the imagination is the liberatorShow MoreRelatedA Force of Nature: Imagination in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery1602 Words   |  7 Pagesseems to him to be poetry at that time† (The necessary vii). What Stevens is suggesting here is that a poet must find a particular voice among other voices –other poets– and that his voice will be significant only if it intends to be a contribution to the theory of poetry, in the sense that they â€Å"are disclosures of poetry, not disclosures of definitions of poetry† (Ibid). 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