From one of Stevens’s final volumes, 1954’s The Rock, “The World as Meditation” revisits some of Stevens’s most consistent themes: the imagination and its sources, the unification of mind and body, and the relation between ideas and objects. The poem not only comments on the Classical work Stevens re-envisions but also looks back at Stevens’s poetic career, crystallizing his ideas about the imagination and creativity into a luminous allegory.

From its first words, the poem unfolds an allegory of art and the artist. Desire moves the artist to action, but desire itself must emerge from stillness. Stevens introduces this idea as early as the poem’s epigraph from French composer Georges Enesco: The musician confesses having spent too much time traveling and playing, but that “la meditation” provides the source of his creativity. Quoting from the composer’s original French interview, Stevens adopts this wider meaning of meditation for the word in the poem’s title as well. If the poem’s title includes the French word méditation, the title might be translated, “The World as Thought.” Stevens relies on every flexible meaning in language, so this choice of epigraph, coupled with the title, reveals the importance of all kinds of meditation in the poem.