THE POET IS THE PRIEST OF THE INVISIBLE

“I desire my poem to mean as much, and as deeply, as a missal. While I am writing what appear to be trifles, I intend these trifles to be a missal for brooding-sight: for an understanding of the world.” Explicit here as elsewhere throughout his work and correspondence about the combined function of his poetry and ministerial office, Wallace Stevens was even more challenged to provide an adequate basis for belief than the earlier priests of the invisible whose heir he was. While Jonathan Edwards had to find words capable of holding together a disintegrating community, he was himself held in the strong embrace of belief in a divine order. While Emerson redefined the concept of the divine, he still believed in an order, the law of continuity he found revealed in the “ecstatic” method of nature.