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In this groundbreaking study David R. Jarraway considers the perplexing question of belief in Wallace Stevens' poetry. From Stevens' early attempts to address the contradictions inherent in a substitutive humanism to his ultimate transformation of the metaphysical matter of faith into a postmetaphysical question of belief, Jarraway leads us step by step along the evolution of this High Modern icon's "genealogy of Belief." By tracing throughout Stevens' career his "relentless probing of what will suffice the spiritual in man," Jarraway deftly reconstructs the ways in which Stevens tried to reconcile an apparently irreconcilable opposition: his conviction that the "major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God," and the modern imagination's movement away from that idea 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 Jarraway never allows his theoretical sophistication to cloak his admiration for the valor of Stevens' imagination, an imagination that, in a world void of spiritual options, strives to shore up whatever fragments remain against our common ruin. Jarraway's readings of critically neglected individual poems as well as his careful study of the relationship of each book - particularly early works such as Harmonium and Ideas of Order - to the development of Stevens' thought are exacting and brilliant. The book's scholarship is rigorous, its prose crystalline, and its thorough focus on Stevens as postmodern long overdue. Wallace Stevens and the Question of Belief is certain to be enthusiastically welcomed and avidly discussed not only by Stevens critics and scholars but by all theorists on the cutting edge of poststructuralist thought
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