Wallace Stevens Research Paper

According to the Poetry Foundation, Modernism originated by growing “out of the philosophical, scientific, political, and ideological shifts that followed the Industrial Revolution, up to World War I and its aftermath.” Furthermore, it “was a re-evaluation of the assumptions and aesthetic values of their predecessors.” As Modernism began, many writers including T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Ezra Pound began creating poems with this new, innovative style. One such writer, Wallace Stevens, shows an example of the new styles and innovations used in Modernist poetry. According to Paul Mariani, Stevens began writing poems while in Harvard as an editor for the Harvard Advovate (12). Although Stevens went on to become a successful lawyer, …show more content…
In fact, J. Hillis Miller states that “The vanishing of the gods, leaving a barren man in a barren land, is the basis of all of Stevens’ thought and poetry.” (Miller 468) Past poets mostly had their own faith and views of a higher being or enlightenment, yet according to Elizabeth Jennings, “Wallace Stevens is a poet without faith in the religious sense, nor does he affirm in the familiar humanist sense.” (Jennings 459) Instead, Stevens chose to pursue truth in a different way – he “pursued truth through imagination with as much rigour and passion as mystics seek God or philosophers seek meaning. (Jennings 459) Stevens’ poem Sunday Morning acts as one of his clearest ways of showing, according to Miller, “the moment when the gods dissolve.” (Miller 468) In Sunday Morning, Stevens describes how he feels about the gods by saying “What is divinity if it can come only in silent shadows and dreams?” (Stevens 1954) This describes how he views the world – divinity only comes in silent shadows and dreams, instead of actually …show more content…
He sings the creative hymns of a new culture, the culture of those who are wholly human and know themselves.” (Miller 468) In fact, Jennings states that Sunday Morning “is a poem about a world without faith yet it is neither a negative poem nor a despairing one.” (Jennings 460) Additionally, according to David Young, Stevens saw the world as one where “poetry and religion were essentially the same thing, with the advantage going to poetry because it does not require or perpeturate dogma.” (Young 235) Indeed, Stevens wished to “announce the ways in which he felt that poetry could replace organized religion.” (Young 235) Instead of using organized religion, Stevens used his own ideas of imagination and reality in order to portray what he viewed as