Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Neil Forsyth (Université de Lausanne)
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Widely regarded as one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, “Sunday Morning” meditates on the relation between religious belief and the pleasures of nature. Wallace Stevens was an American who spent most of his life, when not writing poetry, as an insurance lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut. This poem appeared in a shorter version, with its stanzas edited and rearranged by Harriet Monroe, in

Poetry

for November 1915, and in the form we now read in

Harmonium

, Stevens’ first book of poems, in 1923. It begins by imagining a woman staying home in her peignoir on a Sunday morning, enjoying her “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”, and yet irresistibly thinking, or day-dreaming, about the Christian religion being celebrated in church. The poem represents an imagined dialogue…

2319 words

Citation: Forsyth, Neil. "Sunday Morning". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 May 2011 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=33188, accessed 19 March 2024.]

33188 Sunday Morning 3 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.

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