In the ancient quarrel between poetic imagination and philosophical reason, Stevens sides with the former, though he emphasizes not an unchanging mental faculty but rather the continual work of imaginative reconstruction of the material the world provides—turning ever-changing shades of green into ever-changing shades of blue, so to speak. One of Stevens' themes is the contrast between an imaginative, poetic disclosure of reality as opposed to rationalist abstraction. See for example "On the Manner of Addressing Clouds". Stevens defends the sensuous ground he favors against the philosophers' Plato in "Homunculus et la Belle Etoile", contrasting and recommending instead "the ultimate Plato".