Editing Wallace Stevens (section)

===Supreme Fiction===
''Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction'' is a lyrical poetic work of three parts, containing 10 poems each, with a preface and epilogue opening and closing the entire work of three parts. It was first published in 1942 and represents a comprehensive attempt by Stevens to state his view of the art of writing poetry. Stevens studied the art of poetic expression in many of his writings and poems, including ''The Necessary Angel'', where he wrote, "The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have."<ref>Stevens, ''The Necessary Angel'', ''supra'', p. 6.</ref>

Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction", an idea that would serve to correct and improve old notions of religion along with old notions of the idea of God of which Stevens was critical.<ref>{{Cite journal
  | last = Brazeal  | first = Gregory
  | title = The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?
  | journal = Journal of Modern Literature
  | volume = 31  | issue = 1
  | pages = 80–100
  | date = Fall 2007
  | ssrn = 1738590
  | doi=10.2979/jml.2007.31.1.80| s2cid = 170362316
 }}</ref> In this example from the satirical "[[A High-Toned Old Christian Woman]]", Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:

{{poemquote|
Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms
Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began.<ref>Stevens, ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', ''supra'', p. 47.</ref>}}

The saxophones squiggle because, as [[J. Hillis Miller]] says of Stevens in his book ''Poets of Reality'', the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens's poetry: "A great many of Stevens's poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement."<ref>Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens". ''Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers'', p. 226. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1966.</ref> In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.

{{poemquote|
I am the angel of reality,
seen for a moment standing in the door.

Yet I am the necessary angel of earth,
Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,

Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,
And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone

Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,
Like watery words awash;

A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man
Of the mind, an apparition appareled in

Apparels of such lightest look that a turn
Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?<ref>Stevens, ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', ''supra'', p. 423.</ref>}}

In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea that satisfies the imagination and writes, "The world imagined is the ultimate good." Stevens places this thought in the individual human mind and writes of its compatibility with his own poetic interpretation of God, writing: "Within its vital boundary, in the mind,/ We say God and the imagination are one .../ How high that highest candle lights the dark."<ref name="Stevens, p. 444">Stevens, ''Collected Poetry and Prose'', ''supra'', p. 444.</ref>