International Journal of Arts and Humanities (IJAH)

It may very well be impossible, as J. Hillis Miller asserts, “to find a single systematic theory of poetry and life in Stevens” (Miller 1969: 259). Some of the prevailing critical views of Stevens’ work characterize him as an “atheist” (Pearce 1961: 415) whose work affirms “the firm dignity of the merely natural man” (Bloom 1963: 76). Jacek Gutorow argues that Steven’s “interest in Nietzsche coincided with [...] his insistence on ideas of nobility and heroism,” pursuing a poetic “vision [that] might be called Nietzschean” (Gutorow 2012: 88, 89). David Jarraway writes about a Stevens figured as a proto-deconstructionist, avowing “Steven’s insistence on dismantling the logocentric models of belief” (Jarraway 1993: 311) in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” while later noting that “[t]he question of belief is arguably a major preoccupation throughout much of Wallace Stevens’ work” (Jarraway 2002: 193). William Franke contends that Stevens’ poems “illustrate ways in which language, by negating itself, opens a much vaster and more imponderable realm” even as the works “model and enact [his] ambiguous and finally undecidable relation with religion” (Franke 2017). A useful counterpoint to these readings is provided by Janet McCann in her claim (speaking of the post-1940 period of Stevens’ life) that “God preoccupied him for the rest of his career.” For McCann, Stevens’ poetry “considers God as change, God as the glorified self, God as a Zen-like presence in absence, and God as imagination” (McCann 1995: 2). It is this latter idea that informs what follows, as Wallace Stevens’ poems “Sunday Morning” and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” reveal a mystical preoccupation akin to the Perennial Philosophy, through an effort to put Art into the empty space of “God.”