The Modern Dilemma

Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious, and philosophical anxiety, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. Surette demonstrates the seriousness of Stevens' life-long engagement with the modern dilemma of disbelief, showing that he, like Eliot, rejected the Humanist resolution. Surette proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets' responses in poetry and prose to the same texts and events: Marianne Moore's poetry, the Great War, Humanists and anti-Humanists, the Franco-Mexican Humanist Ramon Fernandez, Pure Poetry, and, finally, the gathering war clouds of the late 1930s.