24 pages • 48-minute read
Sunday Morning
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)
This long, Modernist poem was published the same year as Stevens’s own long Modernist work, “Sunday Morning.” Arguably the most read English Modernist poem, this text provides an interesting counterpoint to Stevens’s poetry. While “Sunday Morning” proceeds measuredly, heavily drawing on Romantic poetry techniques and styles, Eliot engages with the poetic tradition by making a more radical collage of influences. Both poems deal with the imaginative upheaval of the day, but they use different thematic lenses and different literary styles.
“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” by Wallace Stevens (1923)
This poem appeared in Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, in which “Sunday Morning” was also published. While shorter and more humorous than “Sunday Morning,” this text also challenges traditional Christian religious thinking, substituting poetry as an ideological replacement.
“Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds” by John Keats (1818)
John Keats wrote this verse letter in the early-19th century, and it is a fantastic example of the Romantic verse that inspires Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” In the epistle, Keats grapples with the gap between the harmony and brutality of nature in the face of his brother’s terminal illness. Like Stevens, Keats investigates religious thinking in terms of nature, questioning what modes of belief are truly possible for him in a world rife with suffering.
Further Literary Resources
“Wallace Stevens: ‘Sunday Morning,’ The First Great Flight of a Modernist Legend” by Austin Allen (2015)
This robust essay was published by contemporary American poet Austin Allen in Poetry magazine and is currently available on their website. This essay is devoted to “Sunday Morning” and locates Stevens’s work in the literary milieu in which it was published.
The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry by Thomas Grey (1991)
In this book, the law theorist Thomas Grey approaches Stevens’s poetry from the perspective of a lawyer. Grey argues that Stevens’s training and daily practice in the legal field had a radical and thorough effect on his poetry. The book examines Stevens’s verse through this perspective, providing close readings of Stevens’s verse with attention to its relation to law and the reasoning that goes on within it.
Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens by Simon Critchley (2005)
Simon Critchley, the acclaimed contemporary British philosopher and theorist, lends his intellect to understanding Stevens’s work in this monograph. In the book, Critchley argues for the philosophical value of Stevens’s poetry, outlining how its philosophical content can only be expressed in poetic terms. As a bonus, the book also discusses the cinema of Terrence Malick, offering the director’s work as an example of the aesthetic mode with which Critchley sees Stevens engaging.
Listen to Poem
Tom O’Bedlam recites “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens
Veteran voice actor David J. Bauman, who records under the name Tom O’Bedlam, reads “Sunday Morning” by Wallace Stevens.
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