El significado del concepto de imaginación en Wallace Stevens y su origen en la obra de George Santayana

Abstract

This paper tries to demonstrate that the origin of the meaning of imagination in Wallace Stevens should be found in the work of George Santayana, whose idea is that poetry, science and religion are the result of the creative power of the human mind. The difference is only a question of the various shades of meaning between those phenomena that can be verified and those that are exclusively products of the imagination. All ideas are poetic. Even Max Planck is a great poet, says Stevens. As for religion, it must be considered as poetry intervening in the affairs of the world and in the behaviour of men in particular. This is the reason why the poet becomes a prophet. In the end, poetry is the supreme creation of the imagination, organizing the chaos of existence. This way, the concept of imagination can be said to have two different sides: on the one hand, it is very near to a theory of knowledge; on the other, it is part of the ethics and mental constructs that we make of the universe. Even death occurs in accordance with the exercise of imagination one has made in his life, as Stevens comes to say of Santayana in his poem "To an Old Philosopher in Rome."