In Western Philosophy, Hegel introduced the tripartite reasoning with a thesis, an anti-thesis, culminating in a synthesis. Buddhism too used such a tripartite mode to perceive the truth about reality, i.e., Is the World Real or is the Mind Real? This problem concerns Wallace Stevens. I use the early, middle, and late period poems of Stevens to show that the only reality is the Poem's, and it is in the Mind.

Throughout his forty-year career (1915-1955), Wallace Stevens probed the relationship between the imagination and reality. To focus on the endings of his poemsearly, middle, and lateis to see how Stevens went from the apprehension of reality in his early poems like "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1913)¹ and "O Florida, Venereal Soil" (1922), to the brief period when he stressed the supremacy of the imagination as in "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1934). "Farewell to Flonda" (1936) is also a farewell to the wild imagination. "Mrs. Alfred Uruguay" (1940) approaches reality once again through the crucible of the imagination, as does "Credences of Summer" (1946)."The Man with the Blue Guitar" chronologically belongs to the middle period (1937), but it is a poem that Stevens kept adding to and never finished (Miller, 1969, p. 261). Even so, it contains much of Stevens' aesthetic and is a useful point of reference to the Stevens canon. The late poems, "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself" (1954) and "Of Mere Being" (1955) are stark statements of an aesthetic of seeing reality as opposed to merely noticing it. The last poems show where a "Study of Two Pears" (1938) led.

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1971, pp. 92-95)² states two ways of looking at the blackbird (reality): really and unreally. The "thin men of Haddam" see a golden bird, instead of a black one. The pseudo-romantic is a danger to poetry as the literalists of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" who complain that things "are changed upon the blue guitar." Seeing reality imaginatively, however, does not mean seeing a blackbird in "the shadow of [one's] equipage." Reality dwells in concrete things, not in abstractions. The poem begins with "twenty snowy mountains" and ends with the real flux of the real world:"The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying." From the stasis of art, we arrive at the flux of life artistically perceived in stanza XII. The poem apparently goes through endings. The thirteenth stanza returns from the vast flux of an impersonal nature to a lovingly observed concrete, individual detail. "The blackbird sat / in the cedar-limbs." It is the individual thing that gives meaning to the vast abstractions like "reality" or "nature."

American Literature Journal, Wallace Stevens, Western Philosophy, Aesthetic Statements, Romantic Imagination, Cold Calm Confrontation, Dramatic Lands, Opus Posthumous, Psychic Resources, Intellectual Arrogance.