The thing itself: The third world of Wallace Stevens

The notion of the "thing itself" encapsulates the most resonant moments of arrival in Steven's poetry from "The Snow Man" to "Of Mere Being." When assessed as an epistemological quest for objectivity, the "thing itself" almost inevitably becomes ironic and self-subverting.;But the poet who declares "It is never the thing but the version of the thing" is neither naive realist nor skeptical ironist in such moments. Stevens writes poetry in many different modes, and in one we can speak meaningfully and without irony of a "thing itself." This poetry does not claim to rest on an objective ground or to attain presence; its context is the belief that many different kinds of experience can be valid, and it defines itself, as much through tone as through idea, as a poetic space free of alienation and striving, unencumbered by the alienating sense of a confining psyche or of human difference. Stepping away from the metaphors of inside-outside, unreal-real, and human-inhuman, these poems evoke a living sense of mere being that is sufficient in itself.