Wallace Stevens and Religion

A detailed Summary of Wallace Stevens and Religion

This essay offers an explication of Wallace Stevens' poem "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman."

Addressing "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," the speaker proposes "poetry" as "the supreme fiction" (line 1) rather than God or religion. Stevens considered religion as fictions, imaginative creations that made it possible for people to feel at home in a world that is not naturally homelike and hospitable. Thus the speaker's statement suggests that religious fictions have no greater status than fictions of the imagination that include sensuality and play. Yet in his announcement that poetry is "the supreme fiction," the speaker proclaims the supremacy of the human creative imagination.

Religion ("the moral law" [line 2]) has built churches populated with the bodied souls of worshippers, and from that

The speaker surmises that even our most immoral acts can also be glorified and made purposeful through ceremony and ritual ("converted into palms" [line 11]) by staging them in an appropriate carnival-like setting. With respect to his fictive universe and hers, he tells the old woman he has matched human need for human need, ritual for ritual ("palm for palm" [line 12]), bringing them both back to where they started.

In lines 13-20, the speaker concludes his argument by asking the old woman to suppose people with her religious sensibilities (those who uphold the "moral law" [line 2] and are upheld by it) suddenly found themselves in the alternative fictive universe he has just described. What might become of them? That other universe, and those living in it, cannot be controlled as it takes on its own carnivalesque, ribald charact

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Approximate Word count = 563
Approximate Pages = 2 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English

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