Of course, was reading BJ Leggett's fine book again today, Wallace Stevens and Poetic Theory : the chapter dealing with what Stevens drew from Charles Mauron's book Aesthetics and Psychology, in particular the bit about the usefulness of obscurity:

the poem must resist the intelligence
almost successfully...

- which section pretty much contradicts everything I've been saying here. For Stevens, at least during a phase of his career, poetry opposes paraphrase and explanation... but I can't adequately paraphrase this excellent study right now...

"Resonance" and "Symbolism", Jonathan & Kent - they both seem relevant to the process I'm trying to outline. Resonance closer to Stevens, in that it has no implication of fixity of "image"; Symbolism - Yeats was clearly a symbolist of a sort - but the word seems too systematic, like allegory - for what I'm thinking of. Actually Greg's definition of "vision" seems about right.

The poem integrates its parts in such a way that they begin to resonate overtones of "symbolic" meaning, they are iconic pointers, aspects of a whole representation, with which the reader can identify or feel-with-affinity in several ways at once.
Such that a context is provided for individual images proper, or strings of imagery, which begin to echo in the reader's sensibility.

"Aura", writes Catherine... now that's hovering somewhere between resonance and vision!

Josh responds to my late comments on his latest.

Stevens drew some of his material for Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction from a book by Charles Mauron called Aesthetics and Psychology (Leggett covers this in the book I mentioned earlier). I find his/their attitude on these matters pretty persuasive.

It's not that social forces, history, politics etc. must be kept out of poetry, or can be. It's that all these things are part of the world of action, and that the aesthetic impulse or feeling which inspires poetry emanates from another place, the world of contemplation : a pause in reality and its demands, a Sabbath-day in which we simply contemplate without striving to change or be changed. The originality and freedom of poetry, its synthetic power to evoke and present reality in a new light, depend ultimately on this capacity to see & feel & invent without a social demand of any kind; an originary, independent, early impulse. Aesthetic response, creative vision. & then the listener or reader sees & shares it with the artist.