Wallace Stevens revisited

Janet McCann adds an important dimension to our understanding of Stevens in this updated look at his oeuvre, from Harmonium (1923) and Idea of Order (1936) through the Collected Poems (1954) and Opus Posthumous (1957). The interplay of opposing forces in Stevens's work, she argues, reflect a lifelong search for a new metaphysic, a replacement for the Christianity he discarded in his youth. Reading poems from every phase in his life, McCann finds evidence of the intellectual rigor of this search. In Harmonium, she finds Stevens stripping away the vestiges of childhood religious beliefs; in The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937), she reveals his approach to atheism; and in later poems she finds a revitalized religious inquiry, leading to the poet's deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism. In many poems, McCann reveals Stevens's reverence for a natural order of things, expressed in both meter and image, and in others she shows us his beliefs about art as a spiritually transformative process. . Based in part on new biographical material, McCann's analysis diverges from much New Historicist and Marxist criticism by focusing on Stevens's preoccupation with things of the spirit, and on his