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WALLACE STEVENS IS primarily a poet of ideas whose work is continually motivated by questions of how and what to believe in an age of disbelief and secular pluralism. Thus, approaching his work from a philosophically informed perspective seems a potentially fruitful way of reading him, and indeed, many critical studies have approached Stevens from various philosophical perspectives, including phenomenology, idealism, existentialism, poststructuralism, and pragmatism. Several issues arise repeatedly in the criticism, sometimes with only slight variations: how Stevens handles dichotomies between world and imagination, self and not-self, reality and language (and which of these terms, if either, he gives priority to); whether or not his use of the word "fiction" suggests that all our beliefs are false and illusory, or whether it suggests a kind of provisional hypothesis; what, if anything, can take the place of religious belief once it has been abandoned or destroyed; whether Stevens' poems aspire to unification and closure or seek to expose their own con-structedness; and whether Stevens attempts, in writing, to escape from reality, organize reality, or find beauty in reality.
Formalist, New Critical readings of Stevens' poetry privilege order and logos over indeterminacy and flux and resolve the anxieties and disruptions in the work by privileging its closural or idealist gestures. By contrast, postformalist readers agree that Stevens' poems do not attempt to synthesize, transcend, or unify reality via the imagination; nor do they seek any final position (or hold out hope that there can be one); and that they are suspended in an epochal space of doubt in which ideas must continually be overturned and revisited. However, poststructural critics take this argument to an extreme by suggesting that Stevens' poetry circulates endlessly around an abyss, that his rhetorical figures are groundless and without referents, and that the poems do not hold out hope for a belief in any, even provisional, truths. According to Paul Bové, for instance, Stevens continually lays bare an abyss at the core of utterance. Bové points to "the constant penetration to nothingness which his various texts make in their testing of the traditional forms and tropes of poetry" (xv). He claims that, for Stevens, " 'empirical reality' is seen to be finally devoid of transcendent certitude; in the last measure, we are...