“XXVI. Discernment of Spirit” — Most critics would agree that “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself” is an important poem in Stevens’ canon. Among the several reasons for its significance is its pride of place: It is not only the last poem of The Rock, but the last in The Collected Poems…

[My essay “Zen Poetry, American Criticism, American Poetry Zen Criticism: Robert Aitken, Basho, and Wallace Stevens” from “Zen in American Life and Letters,” ed. Robert S. Ellwood. Interplay 6 (Proceedings of Colloquia in Comparative Literature and the Arts, University of Southern California). Malibu: Udena Publications, 1987 (Pp. 1–15).] Zen resists…

The Poem of the Poems — A comparison of The Rock with Scepticism and Animal Faith suggests strong arguments why Stevens’ work should be considered as a “book.” That’s not to say The Rock was a separate, free-standing volume published by itself; instead, The Rock is a group of twenty-five of Stevens’ late poems that appear…

XXV. The Implied Being of Truth — In his lecture “A Collect of Philosophy,” at the end of a passage praising Santayana’s writing style, Wallace Stevens appends a small observation that is all the more curious given the poet’s use of Scepticism and Animal Faith that we have been documenting in this study: By way of an…

In Holly Stevens’ portrait of her father as the young Wallace Stevens, Souvenirs and Prophecies, we see a youth who was a prodigious walker because he fancied himself a writer. His extensive trips into the country and his explorations of cities were fueled by a romantic desire to collect “experience.”…

“XXII. Belief in Nature” — Our notion of nature, Santayana observes, converts the world into a single entity. Indeed, the word is sometimes written with a capital as if Nature was a single person or deity. Moreover, nature is treated as a familiar thing: praised by poets, pointed to by theologians, investigated by scientists. …

“XXIV. Literary Psychology” — Note. We commonly discriminate between what is “objective” and what is “subjective”: between (on the one hand) things and events that occur in the world at large, and (on the other hand) their significance as interpreted by the mind of the individual. Though he often mentions “object” and “subject,” Santayana…

XXIII. Evidences of Animation in Nature — Not as popular as other poems by Stevens, “St. Armorer’s” has not received much critical attention. …

“XIX. Belief in Substance”; “XX. On Some Objections to Belief in Substance”; and “XXI. Sublimations of Animal Faith.” — “The Rock” is the one “long poem” — a phrase Stevens used — in the book that bears its name. In her masterful study On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems, Helen Vendler directed attention to these extended compositions arguing that, in each of his books, Stevens’ short poems were…