The Quest for Unity: Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

Abstract

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) is perhaps Stevens’s greatest poem and the central work for understanding his major themes. With their rapid movements and odd juxtapositions, the individual sections often have the structure of a surrealistic painting. Most of the lines are the iambic pentameter of English speech. Composed of thirty sections, each has seven unrhymed tercets or twenty-one lines. The total of 630 lines gives ten lines for each of Stevens’s 63 years. These thirty sections are divided into three equal parts or cantos – subtitled consecutively ‘It Must Be Abstract’, ‘It Must Change’, ‘It Must Give Pleasure’; each part is composed of ten sections. But ‘Must’ is really, as we shall see, optative; each part could be subtitled ‘It Must be Possible’ – or, better, ‘If it Were Possible’. The poem also has an opening dedication to Henry Church and an epilogue linking the poet to the soldier.

The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give.

Wallace Stevens, Adagia, OP, 186