ABSTRACT
The chapter on Wallace Stevens identifies him as a poet of imagination and gives a brief overview of psychoanalytic views of imagination, focusing on Winnicott’s idea of potential space. After a biographical sketch, which describes how Stevens came to view poetry as a kind of secular religion (a term that has been used to describe psychoanalysis), the chapter moves to a detailed examination of a late poem of Stevens, “The Final Soliloquy of the Internal Paramour.” The two lovers in the poem are viewed as different aspects of the poet’s self, and tenderness that emerges from the encounter is understood to be a healing integration. The case example that concludes the chapter describes a middle-aged man whose vivid recall of his childhood chemotherapy helps him lift the grip of his childhood trauma.
