Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T13:27:39.405Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

14 - Stevens and belief

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2007

John N. Serio
Affiliation:
Clarkson University, New York
Get access

Summary

The question of belief is arguably a major preoccupation throughout much of Wallace Stevens' work. To gain an initial foothold on this important theme, we might turn to a late essay entitled “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting,” for it is there that Stevens remarks that in the modern age “in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost” (748). Poetry, in particular, is an especial sort of compensation, since according to Stevens it is mystical and irrational together, and it prompts him to ruminate: “while it can lie in the temperament of very few of us to write poetry in order to find God, it is probably the purpose of each of us to write poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God” (786). In short, he declares in an important “Memorandum” to a letter from 1940, “The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God” (L 378).

Such emphatic declarations about belief are hardly surprising for Stevens. From his early youth and on into an adulthood that bore witness to his own marriage within the Lutheran Church, the baptism of his only daughter by Episcopal rite, and a purported conversion to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed, Stevens would be drawn to and sustained by a faith whose outward and visible signs mattered less - “I hate the look of a Bible” (L 102), he once declared - than the inward and spiritual grace they were intended to impart. In a moment of candor from his seventy-second year, therefore, Stevens could admit: “I am not an atheist although I do not believe to-day in the same God in whom I believed when I was a boy” (L 735).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×