Wallace Stevens famously quipped, 'A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.' While such a sentiment may do little to win over those who desire a clear raison d'être for their poetry, Stevens' words do contain an elegant implication: a poem is a 'thing in nature' and, as such, is experienced as the world is experienced, with all its attenuating surfeit, mystery, strangeness and contradiction.
