Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age.

Liddy, Richard M.

By Charles M. Murphy. New York: Paulist, 1997. Pp. viii + 129. $9.95.

For Wallace Stevens poetry was rooted in "hard thinking", it is "a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right." Murphy has done a singular service in highlighting the deeply human implications of Stevens's poetry. He traces Stevens's underlying concern for "the whole" in life: nature, inferiority, modern culture ("a new ice age"), and the spiritual implications of the poetic imagination. He illustrates these themes by commentaries on representative poems which are provided in the second part of the work.

Stevens could chronicle the coldness and terror of the world, and yet his later poems reflect a profound trust in reality. Thus in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," morning and evening are "like promises kept."

In fact, M. illustrates that Stevens's basic concern is religious. "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God," Stevens wrote. This in spite of the fact that "one of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from God." Even though Stevens's writings are often assumed to be anti-Christian, M. persuasively argues that they are really a plea that Christian beliefs become more clearly related to the earth and to the actual world in which we live. Stevens once quoted Henri Bremond's thesis that "one writes poetry to find God." To do this is an ascetical task, poets must "purge themselves before reality ... in what they intend to be saintly exercises."

M. also provides interesting details on Stevens's relationship to the Catholic Church and the account that Stevens became a Catholic during his last illness. As Stevens formulated his own search several years before: "At my age, it would be nice to be able to read more and think more and be myself more and to make up my mind about God, say, before it is too late, or at least before he makes up his mind about me." All in all, an excellent work.