After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” – so wrote Wallace Stevens in one of his aphoristic “Adagia.” A giant of modernist English poetry, Stevens grappled deeply and protractedly in both his poetry and prose with the particular character and problems of the modern situation – what he called “modern reality” – particularly the need, as he saw it, for a new “supreme fiction” giving meaning and purpose to human life, a fiction he sought to rediscover or recreate in and through (his) poetry. We will read widely from Stevens’ poems, essays and aphorisms with a view to comprehending and evaluating his poetics of modern reality.