Wallace Stevens: A Spiritual Poet in a Secular Age

Rating:
Summary: A FAKE!
Review: I'm a professor at a Brazilian Universtiy and I bought this book because I thought it would help me to give a better class to my students, since it is supposed to be a book about Stevens's poems. But the author, who is also a Catholic priest, wants to prove Stevens Catholicism placing him at the same rank of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Teresa d'Avila. However, Stevens is not Catholic as St. Ignatius Loyola, since Stevens says: "God is in me or is not all" what is completely different from the Catholic dogmas. Being a modernist priest, the author wants to prove what is impossible to, he says on page 87: "Stevens once called up the definition of God given by Nicholas of Cusa as approximating his own; The Being whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere". As everbody knows Nicholas of Cusa was a heretic. How Stevens could be a Catholic as St. Ignatius if he accepts a heretic's concept of God? The author should be worried about giving interpretation about Stevens poems and not trying to persuade the reader about Stevens faith. I don't recommend this book, if you want to study criticism about Stevens you have to buy Helen Vendler books on Stevens.