Abstract

Wallace Stevens' poetry forms a mid-point between George Santayana's genteel aestheticism and Friedrich Nietzsche's hermeneutic iconoclasm. For Stevens, Santayana and Nietzsche represented opposed types of the modern imagination, Santayana typifying the rational Apollonian intellect and Nietzsche the passionate Dionysian will. Taking a stance between these figures for the imagination in his search for "the central," Stevens becomes a Narcissus to their Apollo and Dionysus. Narcissus figures symbolizing the dual aesthetic-poetic human spirit recur in different guises throughout Stevens' poetry, from male figures like Crispin in "The Comedian as the Letter C" and the MacCullough in "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," to female figures like the nameless women in "Sunday Morning" and "The Idea of order at Key West." All of these Narcissus figures appear at the same mythopoeic station---beside a body of water---which, depending on the nature of the figure, represents either the world or the mind