Wallace Stevens and What the Imagination is Allowed to Do

It's a stale and obvious fact that Wallace Stevens places great faith in what the imagination could accomplish. He feels that the imagination helps shape the facts of the world as we perceive them. (This concept is probably borrowed from Coleridge's careful description of two levels of imagination, the first being that which pulls sensory input together into the ideas needed to conceive of the world).

At any rate, Stevens's faith in the inherent power of the imagination allows him to construct surprising scenes in his poetry. The most well-known examples of this transformative power are probably in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which shows scene after scene of blackbirds in varying relations to the observer and the world. But I want to focus on the closing section of "Farewell to Florida," which transforms the men in the streets of Stevens's Hartford, Connecticut into the waves of the ocean.

My North is leafless and lies in wintry slime
Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.
The men are moving as the water moves,
This darkened water cloven by sullen swells
Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,
The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

I choose this image not because it is the most staggering allowance afforded the imagination in Stevens's work, but because it raises an important question about the ethics of imaginative power. The poet's imaginative metaphor changes the men (in the abstract) into dark water that is "cloven" by the ship. We're aware that Stevens was an elitist, but this act of imagination allows him to tear through the men of the masses in the poetic act. The world doesn't seem to dictate to him as often as it maybe should. That's a value judgment, of course, but one that his poetry asks us to either affirm or reject.