Wallace Stevens

Lee M. Jenkins (University College Cork)
Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error

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 of major studies by the dominant critics of

1876 words

Citation: Jenkins, Lee M.. "Wallace Stevens". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 December 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4221, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4221 Wallace Stevens 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.