An ardent exponent of `reality,' Stevens has made various efforts to investigate its complex structure. To Stevens, reality may be factual or invented. However, he is a critic of factual reality because it has neither meaning nor content, and thus contributes nothing to our understanding. The observer remains passive and without any involvement. Hence, Stevens considers it pointless to limit ourselves to factual reality. Stevens's is an imaginative conception of reality, for it is secular and earthbound: "Beyond earth he will not project himself." This paper traces the relationship between imagination and reality in Stevens's poetry and shows how the poet rejects all attempts at self-transcendence and is fully satisfied with this world, which he is deeply involved in.

Imagination occupies a key position in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It is the central motivating force in his works and can help in tacking the controversial problem of art and life. Stevens, whose work is meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas. "The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully," he writes. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work, `imagination' is not equivalent to consciousness, nor is `reality' equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Or rather, as the title of one of his late poems puts it, Stevens sees reality"as the activity of the most august imagination." Reality is an activity, not a static object, because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning.

American Literature Journal, Wallace Stevens, Philosophical Activities, Bland Depiction, Controversial Problem, Supernatural Machineries, Conventional Myths, Human Immortality, Skeptical Music, Factual Realities.