"A Constant Sacrament of Praise": Metaphysics and the Liturgy of the Imagination in Stevens's "Peter Quince at the Clavier"
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All men by nature desire to know.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.980a1, opening line
Regarding the nature of truth, we must maintain that not everything which appears is true. . ..
—Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.5.1010b1
ACHIEF TASK of the poetry of Wallace Stevens is to reassert an intimate connection between metaphysical belief and the role of the poet. Stevens's spiritual concerns are represented with depth and complexity, and, although their declaration is perhaps more explicit in his later poetry, earlier poems such as "Peter Quince at the Clavier" best express the liturgical role of poetry and of the poet. Stevens must be reckoned as a modernist poet whose central concerns are metaphysical, which is itself a placeholder term for concepts that are themselves placeholders: religion, spirituality, truth, beauty, the sacred, faith, prayer, God. Much as other modernists sought to reinterpret Christian themes or symbols, Stevens repositioned liturgy to rethink the roles and the possibilities of poetry, the poet, and the imagination in a manner appropriate for the modernist era and aesthetic, thereby manipulating the gaps of language and epistemology to allow readers a privileged view "through the bushes" of the poet working to uncover metaphysical truths.
Poetry, Metaphysics, and Liturgy
Stevens's frequent statements about how his poetry coincided with a quest for metaphysical truth reveal his desire to recognize and assuage the trouble caused by society's loss of belief in God. As he wrote to Hi Simons in 1940, "thinking of some substitute for religion" had become "a habit of mind" for him. He clarifies that he does not mean to replace the church, for "no one believes in the church as an institution more than I [End Page 227] do," but to encourage belief in something beyond ourselves, for, he says, "My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe" (L 348).1 Stevens seems sincerely to mourn the loss of the comfort and purpose represented by belief in a personal god, but he acknowledges his search for something more intellectually satisfying and dependent upon the centrality of the imagination.
A telling example of this search is a 1902 journal entry about a walking journey in the countryside that led Stevens to a new understanding of the differences between the truths of organized religion and the truths of nature that could join the conceptions of priest and poet. After visiting St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, he wrote of his belief that "the true religious force in the world is not the church but the world itself: the mysterious callings of Nature and our responses"; he found this contrast to be such that "Two different deities presented themselves. . . . The priest in me worshipped one God at one shrine; the poet another God at another shrine. . . . as I went tramping through the fields and woods I beheld every leaf and blade of grass revealing or rather betokening the Invisible" (L 58–59). Two years earlier, as revealed by Stevens's first discussions with George Santayana, he had already indicated what he saw as the spiritual superiority of nature over the Church. Though Stevens's long relationship with Santayana is well known, Paul Mariani emphasizes the religious and poetic dimensions of their first meeting while Stevens was a student at Harvard (21–23). At Santayana's apartment, Stevens shared his sonnet "Cathedrals are not built along the sea," the import being that nature's beauty embodied a spirituality inherently superior to the human piety of the Church. Santayana replied with his own sonnet employing Stevens's exact imagery but insisting that the Church reforms nature into something with a higher purpose, as stones become a "cross-shaped temple to the Crucified" and the wild wind becomes worshipful organ music (qtd. on 22). Clearly, Stevens's early fascination with nature and its role as a positive force continued throughout his life. Holly Stevens records that in the weeks before his death, her father...
