In this groundbreaking study David R. Jarraway considers the perplexing question of belief in Wallace Stevens' poetry. From Stevens' early attempts to address the contradictions inherent in a substitutive humanism to his ultimate transformation of the metaphysical matter of faith into a postmetaphysical question of belief, Jarraway leads us step by step along the evolution of this High Modern icon's "genealogy of Belief." By tracing throughout Stevens' career his "relentless probing of what will suffice the spiritual in man, " Jarraway deftly reconstructs the ways in which Stevens tried to reconcile an apparently irreconcilable opposition: his conviction that the "major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God, " and the modern imagination's movement away from that idea. At first Stevens suggested that the poetic imagination that created the idea of God "will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary." Unlike previous critica studies of Stevens' concern with faith, however, which have tended to stress his various aesthetic replacements for God, Jarraway compellingly argues that these replacements actually had disastrous consequences for Stevens the poet, resulting in the six years of silence that followed his first collection. Stevens, Jarraway contends, finally abandoned such aesthetic theocentrism and, under the influence of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, tried to adapt his poetry to what he called the "different intelligence" of our age. Adroitly citing modern thinkers like Derrida, Blanchot, and Levinas, Jarraway shows how Stevens' interest in the transformation from a literal quest to arhetorical question led him to investigate the interaction between faith and language. Jarraway never allows his theoretical sophistication to cloak his admiration for the valor of Stevens' imagination, an imagination that, in a world void of spiritual options, strives to shore up w
- ISBN10 0807117595
- ISBN13 9780807117590
- Publish Date 1 April 1993
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 19 October 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Louisiana State University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 376
- Language English