Imagination and the Sound of Words in Wallace Stevens’ “The Comedian As The Letter C”

Abstract

Wallace Steven (1879-1955) is one of America’s major poets of the twentieth century who perfected critical theories about modern poetry writing and its subjects. Stevens’ style is distinctive as modern in its revelation of both linguistic and poetic experimentations. His theories concerning imagination and reality and the use of poetic diction from the modernist point of view are found in many of his poems. Almost like all thinkers, Wallace Steven has his own view of imagination and reality. Many philosophers have affected him deeply in formulating his view point of the subject.The research is divided into two parts and a conclusion: the first part introduces nature of imagination from a philosophical point of view which Wallace Stevens finds embodied in harsh and intolerant American reality. Part two attempts to uncover how Stevens holds both poetic imagination and language to be of the most important tools that a poet should use to express the relation between imagination and reality. Addition, the research sheds light on the poet’s creation of a mythical self through which he wishes to contain the diverse reality in order to re-adjust that self to it. Finally, the conclusion sums up the findings of the paper.