RT Article
T1 Shades of Bliss: Imagining Heaven in Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur
JF Christianity & literature
VO 68
IS 2
SP 252
OP 271
A1 Tate, William
LA English
PB Johns Hopkins University Press
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1662625308
AB Richard Wilbur's "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" describes fountains which embody different conceptions of human virtue expressed in contrasting religious systems. Wallace Stevens's "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman" similarly contrasts conceptions of virtue with reference to worship-spaces taken as embodying the assumptions of competing religious systems. Stevens's speaker reaches the somewhat Nietzschean, somewhat Freudian conclusion that religious practice merely projects human desires; differences are relatively meaningless. Wilbur's speaker, developing Christian theological openness to the other, concludes that the differences between religions make possible a productive complementarity.
K1 Freud
K1 Nietzsche
K1 Richard Wilbur
K1 Sehnsucht
K1 Wallace Stevens
DO 10.1177/0148333118772172