Jonathan Bate (The Song of the Earth) in the Guardian, talks of Wallace Stevens’ poetry and how it opens our minds into the world:-
“...Stevens's great theme was that of Wordsworth and the Romantic tradition: the relationship between the mind and the world, the idea and the thing...
His work turns on the paradox that we are both a part of and apart from nature. We are linked to our environment, and to the species with which we share the earth, in a complex and delicate web. At the same time, we live in culture as much as nature and we mediate our world through language and imagination.
Stevens's great gift was to meditate upon this mediation while always grounding himself in what cognitive scientists call qualia - the specific textures of our experience of the world (the sound of an owl, the auroras of autumn, the green of a cockatoo's wing, the smell of an orange...”
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