Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain, The

"The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain" is the title of one of the poems in Stevens' 1954 work The Rock. The poem is yet another version of an ars poetica. It's plot comprises the recollection of a man who, presumably, has written a poem about a mountain and who now describes the writing process in the same terms as he might climbing the mountain itself.
==What Is The Poem That Took The Place of the Mountain, Really?==
Arguably, the poem Stevens' refers to here is not in fact a complete poem at all, but rather an allusion to the famous Mt. Snowdon scene in Wordsworth's epic The Prelude.  In that scene, Wordsworth reaches the peak of Mt. Snowdon and experiences a vision in which the magnificence of nature is sublimated, becoming an emblem or symbol for the divine power of the poetic imagination. Stevens' description of the poem in his poem bears a number of striking similarities to this sequence, most tellingly the speaker's "gazing down at the sea," since the key moment in the Snowdon scene occurs when Wordsworth's transmutes the cloud layer at the top of the mountain into a raging sea. 
==What Is This Poem/Mountain All About?==
Reading Stevens' poem in light of its allusion to Wordsworth clarifies a number of otherwise obscure elements regarding the speaker's attitude toward actual nature as well as toward the relationship between the poetic imagination and its subject matter. For the speaker, as for Wordsworth and his friend Coleridge--the poetic imagination first dissolves and then recreates nature when it renders nature as its subject. It "recompose[s] the pines, shift[s] the rocks," etc. It's purpose, moreover, is to discover in this process of imaginative recreation sublime meeting, a unification or marriage of subject and the object. Thus, that the poem takes the place of the mountain ought not to be read negatively. It is not an instance of the precession of simulacra, nor of the displacement of the real by language. Rather, it is an instance of fusion, in which the mountain becomes itself for the speaker, for any human interlocutor, only as it becomes a poem.