Lion, the

The lion is a recurring figure in Stevens, appearing in ten separate poems, some of which are major works. The complete list of poems containing lions is as follows: 
* "Lions in Sweden" (lines 9,15,17)
*"The Sun This March" (10)
*"The Man with the Blue Guitar" (221.xix.11, 222.xix.12)
* "Poetry is a Destructive Force" (5, 13)
*"The Glass of Water" (7)
*"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, It Must be Abstract" (93.v.1, 112.v.20)
*"Puella Parvula" (6)
*"An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (182.xi.2, 183.xi.3)
*"The Green Plant" (2)
*"Owl's Clover, The Greenest Continent (OP)" (344.iv.12, 348.iv.16, 364.iv.32)
==What is a Lion?==
It hardly needs to be said, but the lion (genus Panthera, family Felidea) is the second largest big cat in the world, exceeded only by the tiger. Wild lions may be found today in sub-Saharan Africa and in India. The lion is an apex or keystone predator and is notable for being the most social of the big cats, grouping into prides consisting of the hunting females and their offspring as well as a handful of adult males. Once populous and widespread, lions are currently considered a vulnerable species, having suffered a major population decline in recent decades due to loss of habitat and hunting. Nevertheless, the image of the lion (especially the male) is an important cultural figure, one of the most recognizable and widely reproduced animal images in human history.
==What Are All These Lions Doing in Stevens' Poems?==
According to Kinereth Meyer in his essay “The ‘Lion in the Lute’ and the “Lion Locked in Stone”: Statement and Image in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” the figure of the lion is intriguingly bifurcated in Stevens work, representing—in differing contexts—either the poetic imagination or the physical world. For Stevens, the poetic imagination and the physical world are dangerous, potentially destructive “monsters” locked in “a strange fight-to-the-death for dominance.” As Meyer explains, the creative imagination, the “lion in the lute,” provides the necessary fictions by which the world is made to mean, and yet these same fictions can also come to overwhelm, to obliterate, the reality they claim to represent. At the same time, the empirical world, the world of the actual, provides the raw material for the production of meaning, but “its intractability often obliterates our efforts to perceive, describe, and ‘know’ it…” (Meyer 54).