One of the major poets of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens’s remarkable oeuvre is a quasi-spiritual quest for the supreme fiction, for a poetry that “must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns” and thus help modern man find meaning in a godless world. The poet’s role, for Stevens, is that of high priest of the imagination: it is the poet who “gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it.”

Stevens’s extended meditations on poetry and his insistence, in his “endlessly elaborating poem[s] ”, that “the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life”, has made him the critics’ poet. To some a belated Romantic, to others a modernist in the Symbolist tradition, Stevens has been the subject

This article in full comprises 1897 words but only the first 150 or so words are available to non-members.

All our articles have been written recently by experts in their field, more than 95% of them university professors. To read about membership, please click here.

First published 09 December 2004

Citation: Jenkins, Lee M.. "Wallace Stevens". The Literary Encyclopedia. 9 December 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4221, accessed 9 February 2010.]