The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, and Humanism

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...