Abstract

Between Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” and W. H. Auden’s two intertextual poems that allude to Stevens’s poetics, “In Praise of Limestone” and “Miss God on Mr. Stevens,” a critique of mythopoesis emerges. For Auden, Stevens has unknowingly created a myth of the mind in “Notes,” which he playfully calls the “antimythological myth.” Auden’s critique of Stevens’s mythmaking diagnoses a problem similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and the tendency to project oneself onto myth. For Auden, in asserting poetry as the “Supreme Fiction,” Stevens has wrongfully imposed the poet onto his new mythology. I argue that Auden’s critique of Stevens’s antimythological myth pervades throughout “In Praise of Limestone,” and allows Auden to consider whether poets can or should be mythopoetic.