Late Stevens: The Final Fiction

“If one no longer believes in God (as truth),” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. . . . I say that one's final belief must be in a fiction.” Stevens addressed the concept of a "supreme fiction" throughout much of his career, but many critics feel that his poems never realized that concept beyond a theoretical possibility. B. J. Leggett argues that Stevens did indeed achieve the supreme fiction in his often o…