Stevens's understanding that identity / personality / self is very largely structured through images assimilated from the early childhood, and that images are the produce of the conflation of imagination (or, Lacan's `imaginary') and the outside world / reality, led him to unravel the self by laying bare the images that constitute it. His purpose behind this was to study and evolve what he calls the "mythology of self". The place one inhabits being an inseparable part of this `mythology', his work reveals his concern with place as a substantive element of the `self-myth'. For studying the process of the evolution of this `myth', the poet always seeks landscapes that are essentially unfamiliar, non-humanized, unspectacular, even invidious, since only such a landscape offers a better chance for observing and studying the evolution of the `self-myth'. The `North-South' dialectic in his poetry is a resultant vector of his meditations on place. The South represents the humanized, familiar world / reality, whereas the North stands for the non-humanized, non-familiar world / reality.

Dianne Meredith (1999) rightly observes that poets have a penchant for "stretching descriptions of a regional landscape beyond the confines of the purely objective reality" (p. 126); in a way, they attempt to evolve the character of the place. At the same time, there must be poets like Wallace Stevens who muse, objectively, on the place's instrumentality in evolving the character of the people living in that place. In both these cases, the activity of perception is very important, and perception is impossible without imagination. In fact, imagination is the fundamental source of all knowledge. Did not, for example, Newton, first of all `imagine' that the earth must have some force or power that attracts? Would not falsifying the imaginary perception be falsifying the truth itself? Perceptions of a place, therefore, can be used to study territorial identity or, what Knight (1982) ambiguously calls, "geographies of the mind" (p. 517). Interpretations of man's identity are thus a matter of investigation of both place and its perceptions. Therefore, Corcoran (1986) says that American whites, in their attempt to establish an identity distinct from their European inheritance, charged themselves with a pioneering spirit that looked "outwards and upwards, to fulfillment through movement, advance, exploration" (p. 62). In this sense, Stevens is a modern American pioneer, but he does not reflect as much concern for a specifically American identity as for the `way' the self, identity, or character is created.

Like Lacan, Stevens recognized the importance, vastness, and complexity of the field of images and activities of the imagination; both realized the importance of what Lacan calls the "formative value" of the image (Lacan, 1993, p. 165). The poet was also constantly aware that the external world is an inevitable part of images; that, in fact, the external world provides images, which build the general character of a person or the people living in a particular geographical environment.

English Studies Journal, Fundamental Sources, Geographical Environment, Social Forms, Local Mythologies, Verbal Expressions, Stevens Poetry, Human Imaginations, Supreme Fiction, Mental Processes, Ephemeral Fictions, Corporeal World, Grammatical Verb Functions.