Ephebe

The etymology of ephebe can be traced to the Latin word ephebus and the earlier Greek form ephebos. According to Webster's Dictionary, ephebe is defined simply as a young man while ephebus is more specifically defined as a young man, eighteen or nineteen years of age, in Ancient Greece who has entered training in the military or gymnastics to prepare for full citizenship. 
The figure of the ephebe appears as one of the personae that Wallace Stevens calls upon in his poems "It Must Be Abstract," published in Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," published in The Auroras of Autumn (1950), as an impersonal representative of a youthful imagination that has yet to be marred or "trained" by a lifetime of perceptions that prevent humans from seeing the world as it really exists. Unfortunately, according to critic Gyorgyi Voros, humans will never be free completely from a set of perceptions dictated by biology and ironically, language, both of which simultaneously are barriers and paths to whatever is perceived as real. Supreme fiction is certainly abstract, as a consequence, [1] and the ephebe is encouraged in the opening lines of "It Must Be Abstract" to forget what perceptions he already holds to be true to "become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye / And see it clearly in the idea of it" (I, 1-3). [2] Later in the poem, the ephebe is encouraged to understand that the language of poetry paradoxically brings humans closer to imagining the world realistically as "a place / That is not our own . . ." (IV, 13-14), yet also serves as a reminder of the limitations of human perception even in youth.  
==Notes==
1. Voros 53.
2. Stevens in Kermode and Richardson 329.
==References==
"Ephebe." Webster's Third New International Dictionary. 1968. Print.
"Ephebus." Webster's Third New International Dictionary. 1968. Print.
Stevens, Wallace. "It Must Be Abstract." Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997. 329-36. Print.
Voros, Gyorgyi. Notations of the Wild: Ecology in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1997. Print.