The Inadequacy of the image has ever been the besetting problem of idealist esthetics. The discrepancy between the absolute and the contingent, between the thing, the idea of the thing and the experience of the thing provides common cause for the compositions of hermetic art. The basic affirmation of this thesis is that the theory of Wallace Stevens offers a demonstrable solution to the problem and that his relational use of images in The Collected Poems overcomes the inadequacy of those images. In practice, however, this thesis involves the delineation of that solution less than the dialectics necessary to determine its nature. Such a method is dictated by an initial acceptance of deliberate obscuration as one of the formative principles of Stevens' esthetic. The introduction to this paper is little more than an examination of the causes and values of obscuration in Stevens' prose and in his poems and a defence of the method adopted herein to deal with those values; in it, Stevens' poems are viewed as acts appropriate to the practical process of transcendence - a process designed to attain, in the words of the Athanasian Creed, "One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God." The theoretic validity of transcendence as process becomes the onus probandi of "Part I". It constitutes an attempt to appease apparent ambiguities in Stevens' theory of poetry -ambiguities that have plagued critics who would perceive in his poems the principles of his theory - by determining the nature and implications of Stevens' concept of "central poetry." The source, nature, and mode of existence of that concept - used herein as generic name for Stevens' total theory - are characterized by the image of oscillations contained in the thesis title. Basically, the discipline of the "central poet" is analogous to that involved in the via affirmativa and via negativa of religious art, but the phrase 'oscillations of the absolute’ more easily manifests the character of his symbols. The phrase describes both the movement of the mind from involvement in the limitations of images and ideas to free contemplation and the nature of the 'existent images' which become adequate objects for that contemplation. The coupling of oscillations in the image with movements of the mind dictates the kind of study projected in "Part II" of this paper. Therein Stevens' theory is compared to the tenets of symbolism, in terms both of the creation of the individual symbol and of the symbolic work - specifically with Mallarmé's concept of "the Book." The architectonics of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens - the variation and repetition of image, the incorporations of allusion, the progression in the volume from positings of the contingent to existent images of the absolute - are indicated, and the karmic process of the mind as it dramatizes itself in that created architecture is described. Decreation, abstraction, composition, and repetition are treated as the major aspects of the movement of the mind towards the unfettered experience of the absolute. The purpose of this thesis is to provide a concept of the nature of Stevens' poetic that will prove efficacious as a critical approach to his poems. Its validity, therefore, is dependent upon the degree to which the concept herein evolved provides an insight into the experience of The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate

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Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is probably the greatest and most prolific exponent of purist estheticism in all of American letters. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, his first book of poetry, Harmonium (1923) won him the respect and admiration of his fellow writers, but brought him little popular acclaim and less remuneration. His career as a poet spanned four decades, the 1923 volume being followed by Ideas 2( Order (1935); The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937); Parts of â World (1942); Transport to Symmer (1947); The Auroras gt Autumn (1950); The Necessary Angel (a collection of essa7s, 1951); The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954); and Opus Posthumous (a miscellany of poems, plays, and prose works, edited by Samuel French Morse, 1957). Unlike most of his contemporaries, Stevens chose to divide his time between the world of poetry and that of business, keeping in the process very much to himself, and refusing to mix with literary or academie society. From 1916 to his death in 1955, he was associated with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, of which he became vice-president in 1934. [...]

In "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that "Every discourse presupposes a special conception of the listener, of his apperceptive background and the degree of his responsiveness." My study of Wallace Stevens's poetry examines Stevens's "conception of the listener"—in the form of his intratextual readers, their responsiveness, and the shapes that responsiveness takes—and attempts to formulate out of that examination Stevens's theory of reading embodied in his canon of poems.

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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."

In this dissertation, Wallace Stevens' imagination-reality problem as depicted in his poetry is discussed in terms of an eco-critical map-territory divide. Stevens's metaphor of "the necessary angel" acts to mediate human necessity, the map, with natural necessity, the territory, in order to retain contact with changing cultural and environmental conditions. At stake in this mediation are individual freedom and the pertinence of the imagination to the experience of reality. In Chapter 2, the attempt at reconciliation of these two necessities will be described in terms of surrealism. Stevens's particular approach to surrealism emphasizes separating and delineating natural necessity from human necessity so that through the poem the reader can experience the miracle of their reconciliation. In Chapter 3, this delineation of the two necessities, map and territory, will be examined against Modernist "decreation," which is the stripping bare of human perception for the purpose of regaining glimpses of the first idea of the external world. And in Chapter 4, Stevens's approach to the problem of the map-territory divide will be considered against his alienation or internal exile: balancing nature and identity through mediating fictions results in a compromised approach to the marriage of mind and culture in a historically situated place.