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Abstract

This paper aims to examine Stevens's reflections on the relationship between reality and imagination which is the persistent theme of his poetry, based on one of his major poems as poetic theory. "The Man with the Blue Guitar." Critics on Stevens's poetry are roughly divided into two groups: one who views him as the poet of reality searching for things as they are or pure reality, and the other who labels him as the poet of imagination in pursuit of the supreme fiction without which men are unable to conceive of life and reality. In this regard, this poem which contains the poet's desire to gaim access to things as they are and his will to create believable fictions through imagination at the same time could be a good example which supports the grounds of each critical pole simultaneously. In this set of thirty-three variations as if plated on the guitar as a symbol of the imagination, through the arrangement of audience's requests and speaker's replies. Stevens dramatizes the tension between his desire to reveal things as they are and his will to transform reality through imagination and create the supreme fiction. Although he does not liberate himself from the awareness that his imagination can not represent reality as it is due to the will to change, the shows a dim vision that he can create more credible fictions based on the interdependence of reality and imagination which will be more clarified in one of his canonized pieces. Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."