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Creativity, for Wallace Stevens, depends on connections to the natural world which can be examined through garden imagery. Chapters one and two focus on Stevens' private writing, identifying the range of garden environments and natural expanses to which he responded and associating these responses with his aesthetic sensibilities. Continental and Adamic traditions in garden imagery are explored as are contemporary practices in conservation and horticulture. Chapter three concentrates on poems which treat the garden as a locus amoenus of repose and delight where a poet can engage his imaginative faculties with sensual reality. Chapter four analyzes poems whose garden imagery elucidates Stevens' attempts to confront social and political as well as aesthetic issues. Chapters five and six examine Stevens' consideration of the garden as a hortus mentis, emblematic of creative experience, where Stevens assesses the relation of expression to environment and celebrates life lived "in the word of it."

Il Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo is an experience in Lessons on Love. The statues are a constant repetition of the paradox of Eros. The exoteric meaning of the statues will be given through the- narratives that influenced them. Then, the esoteric meaning behind the narratives and the statues will be given with the help of Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love. Because the garden exists in the space of desire, it is able to speak to us today. This thesis is a walk through the garden. It is only through the experience of the garden that architectural meaning is conveyed. The garden is a journey that will heal the body and the soul through the spirit. Il Sacro Bosco leads to a better understanding of the self and, in the Renaissance, its connection to the One.

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