Resemblance and Change in Wallace Stevens' Three Academic Pieces

W ALLACE Stevens' Three Academic Pieces presents what appears to be a perfect transition from prose to poetry.' In the first piece, the essay entitled Realm of Resemblance, he establishes two precepts: that reality is the central reference for poetry, and that resemblance binds the objects of reality together. The mind, with its talent for discerning and forming connections, becomes the organizer of reality. Poetry, as the product of reality and imagination, represents the creation of a new world. As with most poets' writings about their work, however, the essay describes the ideal, while the poetry illustrates what is possible. In the subsequent poem Someone Puts a Pineapple Together, Stevens does build a world out of resemblances, but a world which is exposed as a fiction even before the end of the poem. In Of Ideal Time and Choice, he distends the temporal sense of the mind, though the natural sense of an ending intrudes into the theme. In neither poem does he achieve a reality capable of sustaining itself, but what falls short of the ideal in the essay is a poetic success: one perceives the simultaneity of fiction and reality, the strong consciousness of art

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