ABSTRACT
"Modern reality is a reality of decreation", Stevens wrote; the thought was not voiced dispiritedly, as the fuller sentence reveals: "in which people's revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of their own powers". The imagination can be redemptive not to reveal higher things in spirit and religion, or the official artifacts of culture and the collective imagination, but to reveal "the precious portents of people's own powers", intrinsic in the person, universal in their latency. The collaboration is important for it expresses the strong impulse in both poets directed against the anthropomorphic fallacy as well as the blind impasse of solipsism. If resistance and interruption became stylistic maneuvers as the work of Stevens and Williams suggest, and if poetry remains the expression of a sensibility striving to be in possession of experience, the modern poet may be seen as confronting two opposite barriers to expression.
