The Imagination of Stevens

When I was in elementary school, my teachers always told me to use my imagination and “engage my brain” while fulfilling the various tasks they assigned me, no matter if they involved writing an essay or constructing a diorama depicting my ideal house on Mars. However, my teachers never truly let me use my imagination to achieve my visions, because they always directed my energies toward achieving a specific assignment. By following these instructions, I followed their vision of what the end result of my labors would be, rather than on creating the real-world embodiment of the visions I saw in my mind.

When I started college classes, their emphasis on using critical thinking to further my intellectual growth and understand the material my professors assigned to me gave me a completely new way of using my imagination to broaden my understanding of my world. No longer were books mere words to read and plot points to memorize, but now they were tales that I could evaluate whether I liked them or not, with characters and events that could teach me lessons. When I read Wallace Stevens’ article, “Imagination as Value”, he helped me understand that when I used my imagination to aid my academic progress, it enabled me to think in-depth about the information I was required to process. Furthermore, learning how to engage in my own rich imaginative inner life enabled me to use my own thoughts and ideas to interpret the books and essays I encountered in class. In Stevens’ essay, he makes the point that “the imagination is the liberty of the mind… The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction” (Stevens 138). When my imagination is my primary means of deriving an abstract idea from the chaos that arises out of many different sources of information being presented at the same time, my ability to make sense of the disorder is boundless.

Stevens goes on to describe imagination’s role in our everyday lives, making the point that each person’s world is unique to their self-contained thoughts. For example, he states, “A man in Paris does not imagine the same sort of thing that a native of Uganda imagines. If each could transmit his imagination to the other… what word would the Parisian find to forestall his fate and what understanding would the Ugandan have of his incredible delirium?” (140). In his essay, Stevens answers his own question by explaining that “If we live in the mind, we live with the imagination… concerned with the extent of artifice within us and, almost parenthetically, with the question of its value” (141). In other words, the only task we must achieve when developing our imaginative abilities is to build our own inner worlds, and our own mental models for how to view the material world.

Stevens provides an example of his answer to the question of how an individual only needs their own internal mental environment to create tools for making sense of their world in his poem, “Final Soliloquy of The Interior Paramour”. In the third and fourth stanzas of his poem, he says, “Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,/ A knowledge, that arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind. We say G-d and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark”. In this poem, Stevens tells his readers that the way a person can capture the power of their imagination is to let go of any previous allegiance they might have to ideas outside the realm of their own paradigm. With this poem, he places imagination on the same scale as the Divine, connoting to his readers that the highest achievement they can aspire to is to use their imagination to create their world.