A Study Guide for Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535834339

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Sunday Morning

Wallace Stevens

1923

Introduction

Sunday Morning, one of the collected pieces in Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium (1923), has been singled out as one of his most eloquent and thematically resonant poems. Stevens wrote the first version of the poem in 1914, which was published by Poetry the next year. Harriet Monroe, the editor of the journal, omitted three stanzas of the poem for its publication and significantly rearranged the remaining five stanzas. Stevens made considerable changes, especially to the ending, by the time he collected it in Harmonium.

J. Hillis Miller in William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, writes that Stevens’s poetry is a prolonged exploration, both in theoretical speculation within the poetry itself and in poetic practice, of the power of language not so much to name reality as to uncover it. This uncovering of reality becomes the focus of Sunday Morning as it chronicles one woman’s search for spiritual fulfillment in a philosophical dialogue between her and Stevens’s poetic persona. Throughout the poem, the two examine two contrasting ideologies: that of Christianity and of paganism. The woman must decide which will help her find the spiritual satisfaction she is