THE NECESSARY CONTRADICTIONS: IDEOLOGICAL TENSIONS IN WALLACE STEVENS’S “NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION”

Abstract

This research paper explores Wallace Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (1942) as a modernist meditation on the ideological crisis of meaning in the wake of what is perceived as metaphysical collapse. Structured around the tripartite imperatives “It Must Be Abstract,” “It Must Change,” and “It Must Give Pleasure,” the poem appears to be simultaneously constructing and dismantling its poetic framework. The aim of this study is to analyze the internal contradictions in Notes as deliberate poetic strategies that perform philosophical uncertainty alongside certainties. Using a dialectical close reading methodology, the paper draws on Nietzschean perspectivism, Kantian aesthetics, and Derridean différance to argue that these contradictions are central to Stevens’s poetic project. Each theoretical lens reveals how the poem enacts a cycle of meaning-making, unmaking, and reimagining. The analysis demonstrates that Stevens’s self-sabotaging structure is not a sign of failure but an intentional staging of belief’s fragility in a disenchanted world. Ultimately, the paper concludes that Stevens’s contradictions do not undermine the “Supreme Fiction”; rather, they define it. The poem’s power lies in its ability to articulate a poetic faith sustained not by resolution but by an enduring commitment to imaginative tension.