VII. Imagination and the Lonely Mind

Wallace Stevens was a beguiling poet, deeply aware of the difference between living in a created world and living in an uncreated world. He was also aware of the complex experience of believing that he lived in an uncreated world, while retaining the memory and habits of a person who experiences the universe as meaningful.

Stevens’s ear was tuned to the music Dante evoked in the Paradiso—the harmonies of the one and the many that winged their way beyond his powers to say what his soul had seen. The same music echoes in other poets who resonate with his own jovial yes, whether it is Hopkins with his residuary worm or Arnold scribbling out some circumambient gloom, poets who listened for the mind beneath the world as it appears.

The object of poetry is reality itself, which is always full of change and flux, even when it seems as motionless as a stone. When the imagination manifests itself through the words of a poem, it creates movement among apparently static things. A complete account of reality includes the reality of unreal things, like the images Plato used to construct his philosophical view of the cosmos, which Coleridge called “dear gorgeous nonsense.” But when we no longer feel the force of fables and myths, the world we experience is emptied of ghosts, gods, and souls whether or not they actually exist. We are only left with the poem itself. A poem is all imagination, and a realist must accept its peculiar reality for what it is. We can understand the poem and its imaginative form of reality without believing in divinities or abstract entities. But the poem does have a kind of reality—it really is. There must be degrees of reality. The imagination can relate to reality in its various degrees, but this relationship can falter under the force and pressure of reality itself—the forces of external events or the forces of mental events beyond our powers of contemplative serenity. Sometimes events such as wars exert forces so potent that they change our ability to imagine, ending one form of imagination and inaugurating a new one.

We cannot return to the reality lived by Dante. His enormous imagination was tethered to hell, purgatory, and paradise and was populated with the dead who lived on in a different form. Our imaginations are different from Dante’s imagination because our reality is different from his reality. Dante’s imaginative use of the things in the world depended upon the stories that shaped his reality. Because our minds are abstracted from these stories, we are left with nothing but the things in the world and our transient presence among them. This changes the kind of poetry we write, because poems emerge from our lived experience among the things of the world. When our possible lives change, so does our possible poetry. For Stevens, reality as a whole comprises things as they are, our imaginative presence, and the imaginative presence of others who make up what we call society. The idea of the whole is an interdependent relationship of things as they are, plus imagination. This whole is the content and subject of poetry. The purpose of the poet is to share imagination, lighting up the minds of others so they can live among things and other people in a more interesting way.

The world is made from the senses and the imagination. This gives power to the poet: poets create the world by creating the supreme fictions through which we conceive the world. Imagination conforms to the reality it makes, and reality equally conforms to imagination. Imagination pushes back on reality to survive, and by doing so it changes our perception of things. We make the world in which we live the way a bird makes a nest. Poets and philosophers make worlds, and as poets and philosophers come and go, worlds come and go. But we are nonetheless compelled to make a world with reason and imagination during the short time we are here.

When poets are not making worlds, much of their work involves portraying their own minds, where imagination lives. Of course, the mind of the poet is one of the things in the world, and it interacts with other things in the world. When it brings about ways of seeing things in the world, it does so purposefully, with what Henri Bergson called “forward movement.”³ The progress to which Bergson refers is that of saints and mystics. Stevens’s own conception of the supreme poetic idea is very close to Bergson’s: it is the idea of God. This might seem surprising, since Stevens was not a theist. But this supreme poetic idea best captures Stevens’s sense of the poet’s aspiration and inspiration: “If we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed him in his seat in heaven in all his glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplish his purpose, would have seemed … a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation.”⁴ Poetry has the power to make the incredible credible. It must do this because poetry is conceived with reality, and reality must finally be credible. The poet wants to say true things, even if the truth the poet says is a truth the poet needs. But the poet’s needs are also part of reality. Need is a clue to reality, though its meaning is an open question that cannot be answered by the character of the mere need on its own. In any case, when the poet writes a poem that accomplishes what feels like agreement with reality, he or she believes the victorious poem to be true, at least for a while. This is a source of pleasure and delight.

Metaphysicians make ontological theories about reality. Poets do not. Poets bask in the radiance of reality as it shows up in one thing after another, in no particular order. Things register within the poet, flavored by personality, history, and everything else that makes up a person.

Things resemble other things. We identify a dog because it resembles other dogs. Resemblance holds the world together. The deepest form of resemblance—the analogia entis—can only occur in a created cosmos, because an uncreated cosmos can only have the purpose and meaning ascribed to it by minds like ours. Poetry plays on resemblances. If there is no meaning or purpose to be discovered in an uncreated universe, taken as a whole, how does resemblance work in the poetic imagination? How does an uncreated world hold together?

In nature we can see the resemblance of one tree to another tree, and this perception of resemblance works well when we are comparing things like oak trees to things like pine trees. Resemblance tapers at the edges when we move from the world of trees to the world of bushes, then grasses, then algae. Metaphor is at the heart of poetic metamorphosis. It can express three forms of resemblance, all of which depend on the activity of the imagination.

A poet’s imagination uses reality. But a poet does not own his or her imagination. Imagination is always larger than the poet, borrowing not only from nature but also from collectively built forms of civilization, what Vico called the sensus communis. Imagination is mystical in its reach for ways to express our sense of the beautiful, the erotic, the uncanny. This mysticism can orient itself toward things that occur in nature or toward things we build together, institutions created as imagination meets and uses reality. Imagination is integral to everything the mind receives and gives. Eventually, the cosmos no longer feels made up of images and imagined resemblances but feels simply real. This real world—the final world on which we close our eyes at the moment of our death, when all the work of world-building is finished—is the only reality we can have. Poetry’s only tether to reality is the poet’s mind. For Stevens, this view of the world-making poetic mind is analogous to the ordering, transcendent reality in which Dante and Bruno believed.

“Is there an imagination that sits enthroned / As grim as it is benevolent, the just / And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops / To imagine winter?”⁶ Here, Stevens asks a good question. The imagination eludes and crosses moral categories, as it eludes and crosses seasons, dipping into winter while the body sweats in summer heat, accompanying the world but directing from the throne, a play throne that in one sense does nothing and in another sense organizes everything, like Stevens’s jar in Tennessee. Imagination is the power of the mind over a wilderness of possibilities, including the possibilities of the meaning and value attaching to things and thoughts as they appear before the throne. Imagination shines its light upon things. If it does so in one way the yield is metaphysics, if in another the yield is art. Stevens sees nothing romantic in this liberty of mind: “The romantic is a failure to use that liberty. It is to the imagination what sentimentality is to feeling.”⁷ Imagination is an ordering power, a domain in which reality registers with all its forms, feelings, and conflicting values. It nurtures our way of seeing by bringing an unreal order into chaos so that we see more than chaos, imposing a value but never satisfied until it hits upon the supreme poetic idea: “If the imagination is the faculty by which we import the unreal into what is real, its value is the value of the way of thinking by which we project the idea of God into the idea of man.”⁸

The belief that the world is uncreated can be disorienting to an imagination that needs God as its greatest poetic idea. The imagination is second only to faith for organizing the cosmos and creating our place in it. Imaginatively shifting from the created to the uncreated is different than shifting from the created to nothingness. The imagination allows a diminishing faith to frame the world as merely uncreated, rather than framing it as nothingness. When we come to see the world as uncreated, we turn from belief in divine revelation to a focused awareness of our own power. Our power in an uncreated world is astonishing, because there is no truth apart from our truth, and our only allegiance is to the logic of that truth.⁹

We can be loyal to the truth of the world, as long as we understand it as the poetry of the world, arising from imaginative minds that emerged in a purposeless, accidental universe like stars, rocks, and trees. The poet reaches for what is harmonious and orderly, reaches for what Plato called the Good. Stevens believes this is almost exactly what the poet reaches for—the Good but the Good as a kind of substitute for a God who, if God existed, would transform mystical poetry into prayer. Poetry as prayer was not a possibility for Stevens. But he was compelled by poetry’s power to reach for the Good, to delight in harmony and order, and to find inside a poem something so wonderful that he wonders whether or not we even need to ask about the meaning of a poem. The answer for Stevens is surely no, since he accepts no meaning beyond the meaning we make—human poesis. If God existed, the answer might be yes: if there was a real mystery underlying, pervading, and motivating the very poetry that Stevens finds so redeeming to the human mind, we would want to know.

Skepticism about the possibility of God in this complex world does not diminish our need to grapple with the unknown. Our partial perspectives, our experience of evil in the world, and the tenacious irrationality of our own thinking keep us on the threshold of the unknown. The possibility of insight into this vast unknown is deeply seductive. We are drawn past the ephemeral and transiently shimmering completeness of what we take as the known. When we pay even modest attention to the frayed hems of our best knowledge, we awaken to both the terror and the hilarity of our tumble toward what lies beyond, hymned in poetry’s ongoing expansion and repair of the tapestry of our frail worldviews: “Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse / Without a rider on a road at night. / The mind sits listening and hears it pass … // Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy, / The inimical music, the enchantered space / In which the enchanted preludes have their place.”¹⁰

Poetry is an act of imagination that has the power to organize a world. Though Stevens thought the modern imagination had moved away from belief in God, he also thought the idea of God is, and always has been, the world’s central poetic idea and the mind’s most potent organizing force.¹¹ He did not believe in God, but he did have an almost Anselmian imagination that hurled itself toward the kinds of limits that culminate in that than which nothing greater can be thought. Our experience of the meaning of life’s tragedies and comedies depends upon whether we see these limits without believing that God exists or if we see them and, like Anselm, conclude not only that God exists but that God must exist. This fundamental difference shapes our sense of the world, from which our poetry arises. If God is the major poetic idea in the world, what we do with the idea of God guides our poetry, our theory of imagination, and our perception of the imaginative order of the world. If the central poetic idea is the idea of God, but God does not exist, our imaginations must find a new sense of what it is to be at home in the world. This can be terribly disorienting at first, like being cheated on by a lover you trusted. Stevens calls this feeling panic in the face of the moon: “Panic because / The moon is no longer there nor anything / And nothing is left but cosmic ugliness / Or a lustred nothingness. Effendi, he / That has lost the folly of the moon becomes / The prince of the proverbs of pure poverty.”¹²

When the gods dissolve into nothing, we are left with an enormous sense of loss, even though we are still alive and awake in the world, with imaginations that are as active as ever. The gods cannot be replaced by imaginative will: we actually believed in the gods, and we cannot generate meaningful faith in something we simply make up, any more than we can worship a log carved into an idol once a prophet has shown us the folly of cutting down a tree, and worshiping half while using the other half to fuel the fire on which we cook our dinner. If the gods truly arose from our naive imaginations, once we see their true origin, we will never again submit to them, unless we crave comfort more than reality—a false insurance policy.

After such a loss, we still catch glimpses that make us doubt our doubt. We feel the long shadow of God retreat, but a shadow is always a shadow of something. We may not have heard an interpretation of this shadow that compels us to capitulate to faith—so many accounts sound suspiciously like variations on ourselves—but we still have an unsettling sense that there is more to the story. Perhaps there is no God. But perhaps the true work of skepticism is to free our imaginations from small gods, so that we can find something deeper behind our poetic and philosophical ideas, which in turn enlivens our imaginations. This possibility hovers over both our poetry and our philosophy as we reach for we-know-not-what. Stevens was moved by Bruno’s discussion of Copernicus, who found his way from the cramped prison of his own timid assumptions to the idea of a vast and beautiful universe inhabited by infinite creatures and endless new worlds, each of which mirrors the splendor of their divine creator.

There is a kind of philosophical thought that excels in sorting through the things of this world, especially those we explore in science. In an uncreated world, the imagination can carry us beyond the philosophical inventory of the local world into the poetry of the local world in surprising and beautiful ways. But because the imagination is governed by the limitless limit of the poetic idea of God, there is always a lingering what if? In a journal entry from August 10, 1902, Stevens recorded his own haunting doubt, which he experienced in the transept of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He thought of our response to nature as the world’s true religious force. But standing in St. Patrick’s, the conflict between the religious forces of the church and nature suddenly disappeared. He saw neither of them very clearly, but he felt himself drawn like a priest to the one and a poet to the other: “As I sat dreaming with the Congregation I felt how the glittering altar worked on my senses stimulating and consoling them; and as I went tramping through the fields and woods I beheld every leaf and blade of grass reviewing or rather betokening the Invisible.”¹³

What if we change one thing about reality? What if we join Anselm and imagine God not merely as Stevens’s central poetic idea but as actually existing? Call it a thought experiment if that helps. If God does exist, does that change the effect of Stephens’s poetry and his ideas about the imagination? The question can be tested on lines like these: “A woman walking in the autumn leaves, / Thinking of heaven and earth and of herself / And looking at the place in which she walked, / As a place in which each thing was motionless / Except the thing she felt but did not know”¹⁴ or, “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun … / It can never be satisfied, the mind, never”¹⁵ or, “We say God and the imagination are one … / How high that highest candle lights the dark. / Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough.”¹⁶

Because of Stevens’s fascination with the idea of God, I like to read his poems from inside what I imagine his world to be and then reread them from inside the possibilities available to the imagination if an incomprehensible God created the universe. His poems evoke the feeling of philosophical ideas, ideas such as the ontological difference between something that can feel the whatness of things and something that cannot. His poetry ushers the imagination into such a peculiar space: “The thing I hum appears to be / The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”¹⁷

The patterns that emerge among things themselves, and among things and the imagination, point toward what Stevens called the central poem. In the created universe, because there is a purpose for the cosmos as a whole, the patterns point to a central poem of the world, the essence that is in-and-beyond existence. If the imagination is a created thing, poetry recapitulates the order of the something more—the transcendent central poem—that fascinated but eluded Stevens. At the limits of our power to communicate our experience of what is ineffable in reality, music orders our words, expressing a kind of spoken–unspoken wisdom in the resonances of our metaphors and the phonic links of our phrases, resonances of the sort that makes us think of the metaphor of a Muse when we encounter true poetry. The Muse knows more than she says. She provokes our souls and stirs us from slumber to coax us into singing a song about the strange realities, visible and invisible, that show up through imagination: “The thing I hum appears to be / The rhythm of this celestial pantomime.”

What is the pattern of this central poem? For a theist, the central poem is expressed in the analogia entis, which is fundamentally about the rhythm between God and creation, between the ground and the grounded, between God’s scientia visionis that sees through the whole universe and the potency within ourselves that is an image of this power of God. Patterns of reality and the philosophical imagination that reaches for these patterns are both manifestations of essence in-and-beyond existence: they mirror the central poem, calling to us through the poems that appear on the page while hinting at a limitless poetic background, the myth that delights because it is the very pattern that resounds in all the work of the mind—its movement back and forth between the infinite and the finite, the necessary and the contingent, the universal and the particular. It is a kind of play that borrows from the deep structures and mystery of analogy. It must be seen to be seen, like a poem, or a joke, or Anselm’s idea of God. We either get it or we do not. Our experience of the infinite, the universal, and the transcendent is not entirely out there. It arises from the peculiar particularities of our local, contingent, fragile individual existence. There is something inside our frailty that must reach toward the transcendent, not in a way that diminishes the value of the immanent but as a genuine expression of our longing for reality. Some part of us is transcendent, and we are made more real by this elusive transcendence. Stevens believe in a relationship between the great fiction of the central poem and its lesser manifestations in imitative poems. In that relationship there is an imaginative space for the idea of transcendence: the play between the central poem and lesser poems is a kind of image of the human mind, the mind of creatures who shine forth the imago dei. This idea certainly makes more sense if God exists. It is serious play, and it shines the beam on something that is central to the question of philosophical imagination in a created universe, the relationship of the made to the unmade, the poetic apriori.

Human beings live at the nexus of this paradox between infinite and finite, absolute and contingent, universal and particular. We live in the gap, and our minds are constituted by the prods of these electric charges of metaphysical energy that provoke and sometimes torment us. Because of this, we track down the answers to questions about the unknown by following the ancient philosophical injunction, know thyself. In part, we understand our mysterious minds and our relation to the unknown through what make, the poems that emerge from our minds, as though the work of thinking should be accompanied by the chant, Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble … We search our poems for clues, patterns, and maps that help us see the whole of reality. Imagination is the power that keeps our minds from descending into Earth or flying away into formal abstraction. Imagination keeps us on the bridge between the divine and the world of larval worms crawling through dirt. Imagination keeps our souls grounded in the soil.

What is most valuable about us does not show up in the quantitative measurements of our biology, nor in the metrics of our productivity in the workplace but in the forms of love, play, and sometimes offhanded imaginative expressions that lend flavor to the way we tell the story of our lives to others. It is what shows up in our commitment to a promise, lament over loss, and questions we feel while looking at the night sky. It is what Hopkins called inscape, when we turn toward our own inner reality and our inner experience of outward reality. We discover the value of the cosmos within our imaginations. We value it because it is actually valuable. It makes us happy that the world exists. It makes us ask, Why is there something rather than nothing? and the correlative questions, Why am I something rather than nothing? and Why am I here? These questions provoke our interest in structures of meaning. We want to know whether the scaffolding on which all expression of human meaning hangs is completely of human making or whether that scaffolding depends on resonant structures in the universe that are harmonious and interpretive. If such structures exist, our own sense makes deeper sense. They locate the fragments of our contingent lives within the whole, orienting the stuttering brokenness of our minds to the mind beyond mind that allows stillness even on the threshold of our own graves. Stevens rejected this possibility, not because he did not desire it and not because the patterns in mind and in the world failed to move him to wonder about God but simply because he could not, or would not, have faith, whatever that means.

So, which view of reality is truer? If a poem is proved only by another poem, how do we climb the ladder of poems to reach the central poem, the source of whatever reality poetry has? This is a shadow of the questions about ourselves and the world. Are we disconnected finite selves in a universe of disconnected finite things? Are we finite contingent selves fundamentally separated from the absolute? Are we contingent selves that are somehow related to the absolute but in a way closer to the analogia entis of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions? Are we isolated finite contingent beings who can choose for our connections with other people to be profoundly meaningful and just as easily choose to hook up casually, and by merely proclaiming the relationship to be casual, make it so? Or do we connect to each other within a larger frame of meaning that is not merely immanent but that has a transcendent relation defining the meaning and consequence of the union? We can ask questions about human transactions that require trust, form minds, create culture, and change our bodies. But perhaps none of these has the implications of the singular union found in sex, not merely because of how it involves our bodies and not merely because it can lead to the existence of a new human being but also because, well, it is a mystery, and it feels important.

Those of us who love reality want to be fully ourselves. But our search meets with paradoxes to which both the mystics and the poets bear witness. There are echoes in Stevens of the mystic’s insight in his poem “The Idea of Order at Key West”: “The glassy lights, / The lights in the fishing boats … / Mastered the night … / Fixing emblazoned zones … / Arranging, deepening, enchanted night.” The light makes the dark darker, makes it more itself. Following Hopkins, we might borrow the language of Scotus to say that the thisness of the light deepens the thisness of the dark, without becoming the dark. Through the one, we see the other more clearly. The analogia entis functions in this way, as the form of our insight into the imago dei. Analogy also reveals the distance between creator and creature, which is the condition for creaturely existence as a gift from God. Simone Weil gestured toward this when she wrote about the absurdity of our life: “Everything that we want is in contradiction with the conditions or consequences which are attached to it. It is because we ourselves are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God.”¹⁸

From inside the world of science, there are thinkers who bear witness to something similar regarding the deep structures of reality. When we release our diminished view of reality, we begin to discover true things about ourselves by emptying ourselves. But if science becomes one more of our imaginatively cramped idols, it can halt our growth. The pioneer in quantum physics, Erwin Schrodinger, is worth quoting at length to make the point:

The scientific picture of the world around me is very deficient. It gives me a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but is ghastly silent about all that is really near to our hearts, that really matters to us. It cannot tell a word about the sensation of red and blue, bitter and sweet, feelings of delight and sorrow. It knows nothing of beauty and ugly, good or bad, God or eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great unity of which we somehow form a part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God, with a capital “G.” Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we have said this is not astonishing. If its world picture does not even contain beauty, delight, sorrow, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to the human mind?¹⁹

Schrodinger’s recognition that our minds have such an idea and that this idea is important for our grasp of reality is in the spirit of Anselm whose Proslogion was itself an insight into the believing mind. It is the sense of an eternal harmony grounding the music we create, an echo of something fitting to us but residing beyond what can be measured by the wonderful disciplines of science that show us so much about the created world. This is the nature of Stevens’s central poem, though he did not believe in a universe in which it could be more than a fiction. The myth of the central poem clears room for the same illuminating disorientation that occurs whenever the transcendent breaks in on the predictable, controllable, stable world of our daily life. It gives us a taste of what we call—using a placeholder in the face of the unsayable—heaven. The unifying argument from experience turns on the reality of beauty, which is ineffable but which shows up by its very nature.

The poet, like all of us at our best, seeks to make a bridge between what is real and what is made in the cauldron of our own living imaginations, rooted in lives that must hold together everything from sexual union, to tying our shoes, to craving spiritual answers when our world is breached or fractured. New fractures occur, sometimes on the heels of unwieldy questions, and the unity that we crave eludes us, tipping over the horizon of this curved existence. Stevens’s man with the blue guitar says, “I cannot bring a world quite round, / Although I patch it as I can.” In saying this he speaks for us, whether we believe that our only tools for patching are fictions all the way down or else believe there is more to the story. Of course, we know we do not know everything. But the story of what we know evolves as our imaginations reach farther and as we talk among ourselves about what we discover. Great poetry reveals a suggestive pattern recurrent in the best efforts of the mind and imagination—in mathematically describable motions of the planets and subatomic particles, eruptions of metaphysical systems, proportions incarnate in great cathedrals and works of art, and in the never adequately accounted for splay of beauty everywhere. Such poetry is a portrait of the journey of our minds and imaginations in this short life.

Stevens was pessimistic about our sense of having a telos, an end that is more than a fiction. Hopkins caught a glimpse of something more, like God passing by Moses and covering his eyes, allowing him to see only his back. It is worth remembering that the reason God allowed Moses to see only his back was that anyone who sees the face of God must die—or to say it a different way, we must die to see the face of God. In “Sunday Morning” Stevens writes, “She says, ‘But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss.’ / Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires …”²⁰ The relationship between death and seeing the face of God extends to our attempts to express the ineffable, to whatever exists before all our making, which we discover through the imaginative work of the poetic apriori.

Meanwhile we are alive, and we seek the face of God, whether as a fiction or as a way to worship better. The elusiveness of that face comes from its distance, the interval that is necessary for our own existence, a loving withdrawal that is a condition for creation. But as we imagine the truth of the invisible, we can also wonder whether this elusiveness of God’s face comes in part because God’s face is changing. Do our acts of creation make us partners in the process that is the making of God? The idea of the poetic apriori presses this question above all: What is this invisible that is revealed and betokened by the leaf and the blade of grass, presented to a mind with an imagination capable of seeing the poetry of the world?

¹ Wallace Stevens, „Esthétique du Mal,“ Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson, Library of America, New York (1997), 282–83. All quotations from Stevens‘s poems are from this edition.

²  Stevens, „A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,“47.

³  Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton, University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1977), 58.

⁴ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 674.

⁵ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 688.

⁶ Stevens, „The Auroras of Autumn,“ 360.

⁷ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 728.

⁸ Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 735.

⁹  Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 750–51.

¹⁰  Stevens, „The Pure Good of Theory,“ 289.

¹¹  Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 806.

¹²  Stevens, „Esthétique du Mal,“ 282–83.

¹³  Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 929.

¹⁴  Stevens, „Owl’s Clover,“ 154.

¹⁵  Stevens, „The Well Dressed Man with a Beard,“ 224.

¹⁶ Stevens, „Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,“ 444.

¹⁷  Stevens, „Landscape with Boat,“ 220.

¹⁸ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Marion von der Ruhr, Routledge Press, New York (1999), xxvi.

¹⁹  Erwin Schrodinger, My View of the World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1964), 93.

²⁰ Stevens, „Sunday Morning,“ 55.