Abstract

Taking its title from "Of Modern Poetry," this study traces a genealogy of belief primarily through the seven books comprising The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God," he once remarked. But because one of the hallmarks of the modern imagination is a movement away from the idea of God. as Stevens also contended, previous studies of the poet's long-term concern with faith have tended to foreground various aesthetic replacements. The evolution of what Stevens himself called a poetic "substitute," however, had disastrous consequences, and threatened to end his writing career well beyond the six years of silence following his first book. In consequence, the radical alteration in belief experienced in the middle-period of Stevens' career, and focussed mainly in his third book, Parts of a World, represents primarily a rhetorical crisis in the poet's work. Prior to that point, the genealogy elaborates what the poet refers to as "the choice of ideas" in matters of faith between God and Man. ;In the post-structural etiology of belief following his third book, we find Stevens' writing overtaken by a preoccupation with a generative force rather than generic form--"De-scription without Place" in the famous poem--and a rhetorical realignment privileging the distributive paradigms of "semiosis," in contrast to those of substitutive mimesis and poesis formerly. Once Belief passes from a literal quest to a rhetorical quest , Stevens begins to concern himself more and more with faith as a performative of language: the "Romance of the Precise" in the poetry, or the "Effects of Analogy" in the prose. In the end, the poet's theorizing Belief less in terms of object than of event or "style," gives to his work a Heideggerian edge that fully anticipates a highly deconstructive discourse typified in recent writing by contemporary a/theologians such as Mark Taylor, Charles Winquist, and of course, Jacques Derrida