"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction"

In 1942, Wallace Stevens wrote a 650-line poem called Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, in which he defined poetry as "an interdependence of reality and the imagination as equals" (Glaser). He believed that a poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words, and that reality and imagination germinate together in the poet's work because of what his own language brings to its reference. In A High-Toned Old Christian Woman (1915), Stevens likens poetry to God and portrays them as equals - both works of fiction conceived in the minds of poets (Lancashire; Schwarz). The poem is a parody of religion, seen through an alternative fictional universe. The speaker in the poem addresses the Christian woman and confronts her with the idea of an alternative reality consisting of so

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