Wallace Stevens’s Poetry of “The Strange Unlike”

Essential to the poetry of Wallace Stevens is a dramatized aesthetic need that echoes phenomenological themes not only observable in the thought of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger but also traceable in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche WilliamJamesrecent “possible worlds” theory.1 The reiterated concern is for the need to find fulfillment in this life inthisworldfor acknowledging the impediments that derive from a priori proscriptions to that fulfillment. Calling for satisfaction in this world which as “this” seems to be a comfortably closed dimension would seem to generate a shallow hedonism. Yet “this”worldconsidered pragmatically and phenomenologically becomes less a closed systemmore a concatenation of possibilities and opportunities. The angels that must be struggled with are voices from the past that have constituted a world-understanding as idealism opposed to realism or as other worldliness in conflict with this-worldliness. These conflicts turn around the essential human problems of knowledge and being of a being in a world experiencing it, troubled by the gap between knowing and the known.