Editing Wallace Stevens (section)

===Imagination and reality===
For Thomas Grey, a Stevens biographer specializing in attention to Stevens as a businessman lawyer, Stevens in part related his poetry to his imaginative capacities as a poet while assigning his lawyer's duties more to the reality of making ends meet in his personal life. Grey finds the poem "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts" useful to understanding the approach Stevens took in separating his poetry and his profession, writing: "The law and its prose were separate from poetry, and supplied a form of relief for Stevens by way of contrast with poetry, as the milkman (portrayed as the realist in the poem) relieves from the moonlight, as the walk around the block relieves the writer's trance like absorption. But the priority was clear: imagination, poetry, and secrecy, pursued after hours were primary, good in themselves; reason, prose, and clarity, indulged in during working hours, were secondary and instrumental".<ref>Thomas Grey. ''The Wallace Stevens Case''. Harvard University Press. 1991. Page 46.</ref>

In the ''[[Southern Review]]'', Hi Simons wrote that much of early Stevens is juvenile romantic subjectivist, before he became a realist and naturalist in his more mature and more widely recognized idiom of later years.<ref>Mariani, Paul. ''The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens'' – April 5, 2016. Pages 239.</ref> Stevens, whose work became meditative and philosophical, became very much a poet of ideas.<ref name = "adv" /> "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully",<ref>Stevens, Wallace. ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', New York: Library of America, 1997 (Kermode, F., & Richardson, J., eds.), p. 306.</ref> he wrote. Of 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. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world; reality is an activity, not a static object. 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. Thus Stevens wrote in "[[The Idea of Order at Key West]]":

{{poemquote|
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.<ref>Stevens, ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', ''supra'', p. 106.</ref>}}

In ''Opus Posthumous'', Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption."<ref>Stevens, Wallace. ''Opus Posthumous'', London: Faber and Faber, 1990 (Milton J. Bates, ed.), p. 185.</ref> But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.

Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible."<ref>Stevens, ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', ''supra'', p. 41.</ref> As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them."<ref>Stevens, Wallace. ''The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination'', Random House USA Paperbacks (Feb 1965) {{ISBN|978-0-394-70278-0}}</ref>