ABSTRACT
This chapter takes me back to my point of departure for rethinking fetishism: the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Many years ago, I wrote a paper on Stevens’ canonic early poem “The Snow Man” as an opening to rethinking the conjoint questions of fetishism and reality. Throughout his work, Stevens is concerned with how poetry can elaborate “a new knowledge of reality” through imagination. His late cycle of poems, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” offers rich possibilities for extending this “new knowledge,” and contains many references to everything elaborated previously here. Stevens considers the essential question of the relation of a thing and man such that one cannot distinguish between “the idea and the bearer-being of the idea.” He advocates a kind of “hyper-reflective” poetry, a poetry this is simultaneously a “theory of poetry” and a “theory of life.” Such poetry is a “thing” (res). And such poetry takes the question of “iridescence” as a matter of life and death.
