For St. Peter's Day
"For Stevens, the poem 'makes meanings of the rock.'
In the mind, 'its barrenness becomes a thousand things/
And so exists no more.' In fact, in a peculiar irony
that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion
of the imagination's function could develop,
the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered
into such diamond-faceted brilliance
that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought…."
—A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954)
in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes,
by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120
Related material on transforming shapes:
