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Nominalism and Modernist Literature | Prof. Erik Tonning

The Thomistic Institute

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The Supremacy of Imagination and Reality

In Wallace Stevens's notes towards the supreme fiction, for example, we find passages like these which would be utterly unthinkable in Beckett. The poem through candour brings back a power again that gives a candid kind to everything. Poetry conceived as the search for momentary conjunctions of expressible bliss is therefore itself what Stevens calls the supreme fictions. Undepending this whole desire for poetry as a supreme fiction though is a nominalist story very much like that outlined by Fritz Mountain.

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