In his own life Stevens himself experienced this loss of faith in a providential order; he took up the challenge of the poet in the modern world; and the success he had in "finding what will suffice," which is considerable, is the measure of his greatness.
Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on 2 October 1879, the second of five children, to Garrett Barcalow Stevens and his wife Margaretha Catharine Zeller, known as Kate. The family were prominent members of the Dutch Reformed church, and the three Stevens boys attended elementary schools run by the Evangelical Lutheran church. There is a photograph, circa 1893, of Wallace Stevens in a cassock and surplice, but before long, presumably during his years at Harvard, he became an agnostic, and such he remained up to the last days of his life. In lieu of faith in a supreme being and a providential order determined from on high, Stevens sought to discover a transcendent beauty and a transcendent wisdom in the world itself by means of a union of the imagination and external reality, in what he called a "Supreme Fiction," which is to be found in poetry. In his "Adagia," a collection of aphorisms on poetry and imagination that was included in Opus Posthumous (1957), he wrote "The relation of art to life is of the first importance especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God, the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate, for the support they give." One of his late poems, "The Bed of Old John Zeller," contrasts the religion of his grandfather ("the habit of wishing") with Stevens's practice of poetry: "It is easy to wish for another structure/Of ideas and to say as usual that there must be/Other ghostly sequences and, it would be, luminous/Sequences ....
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