Leon Surette's new study of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase.
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.
The Modern Dilemma shows the extent of the common ground shared by two of the twentieth century's most prominent modernist poets, casting light on how the political and cultural developments of their time helped to shape their art."
