The Pun in Wallace Stevens’ Poetry

Abstract

Abstract: The American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens offers the “supreme fiction” as a substitute for religion. This “supreme fiction” is a secular poem based on the interdependence of reality and the imagination. Throughout his poetry, Stevens makes use of a lot of puns to explain the nature of the “supreme fiction” and the conditions for its credibility. Accordingly, some puns are employed with the purpose of refuting romanticism, classical mythology and Christianity that rest mainly on non-natural foundations while other puns are aimed at showing how limited the rationalist thought that overestemates reason and belittles the imagination. Stevens also resorts to puns in order to explain his “supreme fiction” as a humanistic project that protects man from the pressure of reality. Through close reading, this article examines the different implications of the use of puns and reaches the conclusion that puns formed from words with secular connotations serve as a good device to suggest poetry as the replacement of traditional religions as life’s redemption in modern era. By replacing religious words, the puns also contribute to make Stevens’ poetry highly secular. Keywords: imagination, pun, reality, secularity, Wallace Stevens