The Romantic Humanism of Wallace Stevens

No less than Lucretius before him, "Stevens saw beneath the illusory surface of our world to the whirling vortex of the atom. He knew that life is motion and that structure is illusion. Like most of us moderns he felt from time to time the discomforts of motion sickness, and like most of us he felt a 'blessed rage for order' in the face of the uncertainties of whirl and flux. He knew, or came to know, that to give form and beauty to what is essentially without form or beauty is to falsify, that to fix 'reality' even momentarily is to create a fiction. But he came to know, too, that the final belief must be in a fiction and that the courageous man knows that it must be so and chooses carefully and well."

--Richard Allen Blessing, Wallace Stevens' "Whole Harmonium", Syracuse University Press (1970), 6-7.