Abstract

"At first Stevens suggested that the poetic imagination that created the idea of God "will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary." Unlike previous critical studies of Stevens' concern with faith, however, which have tended to stress his various aesthetic replacements for God, Jarraway compellingly argues that these replacements actually had disastrous consequences for Stevens the poet, resulting in the six years of silence that followed his first collection. Stevens, Jarraway contends, finally abandoned such aesthetic theocentrism and, under the influence of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, tried to adapt his poetry to what he called the "different intelligence" of our age. Adroitly citing modern thinkers like Derrida, Blanchot, and Levinas, Jarraway shows how Stevens' interest in the transformation from a literal quest to a rhetorical question led him to investigate the interaction between faith and language.".