“The Plain Sense of Things” by Wallace Stevens delicately explores a certain dualism he finds in creativity by exploring the conflict between creativity and the lack thereof. He talks about the point at which creativity ends, where it dries up and becomes “inanimate,” but then goes on to emphasize how necessary that point of null inspiration is in the larger cycle of things. He uses the period between autumn and winter, when the leaves have fallen and there is, as he explains, "a clear sense of things", a "cold emptiness" and a "sadness for no reason" as a way to represent this stagnation. of creativity which he sees as a necessity. He writes the poem without rhyme, and while the lines seem to try to push towards ten syllables, there is little evidence of the iambic pentameter required for blank verse or any other meter. The poem is full of redundancies and longer, clumsier words (“a repetition / in a repetition,” “required, as necessity requires,” “inanimate,” “inert,” “adjective,” etc.) that are difficult for the reader. say and make the reader uncomfortable, leaving him thirsty for fluidity. Wallace begins the poem with leaves. The words in the first line refer to a point after the leaves have fallen; Wallace cleverly places them in our minds by referring to their absence and so begins the poem with an image of life, of nature, of an energy in movement. The reader moves away from this rather quickly, however, as the leaves have already fallen, and the second line moves straight into the stagnation – this “plain sense of things” – from which the poem itself is named. Then, in the third In Principle, we are given a rather blunt definition of this “simple sense of things”: it is “the end of imagination”. Rather than dancing... in the middle of the paper... had/Itself to be imagined." through the poem's backwards way of highlighting what is not there, the poem begins to speak very powerfully about the power of imagination. The imagination can imagine itself and is absence; it almost borders on a power of self-creation. to create and define both Himself and its absence. In the final stanza, Wallace takes the struggle between creativity and its absence one step further, stating that absence is “necessary, as necessity requires in this way.” , Wallace brings the poem to an inescapable dualism and, in a sense, introduces elements of hope into an otherwise sad reality. The absence of creativity is necessary in the same way that winter must come before spring, and its need serves to testify to its power and beauty..