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“It is the belief and not the god that counts” (Stevens 1990, p. 188), writes Wallace Stevens in his Adagia (1934–1940). For Stevens, belief remains a necessity even after the death of God, and the importance of poetry grows proportionately: “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (Stevens 1990, 185). Poetry can redeem us, it can save us, for apparently, we still need saving, even, or perhaps especially, in a godless world. In Stevens’ view, “Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry” (Stevens 1990, 190). Hence his use of the term essence: poetry is something intangible—a spirit or idea—which we experience in words, though it is by no means only its words: “Every poem is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea within the poem of the words.” And yet “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (Stevens 1990, p. 188)—an adage in which one hears an echo of the commandment of Deuteronomy 6:5: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” We cannot love the essence of poetry, perhaps because it is beyond us in its very intangibility. Rather, we must love the words. Therefore, writes Stevens, “It is possible to establish aesthetics in the individual mind as immeasurably a greater thing than religion” (Stevens 1990, p. 192), codifying a notion that Stevens puts forward years before in “Sunday Morning,” when his female persona recognizes that “Divinity must live within herself,” that “All pleasures and all pains…are the measures destined for her soul” (Stevens 1954, p. 67).

Stevens’ aestheticism is predicated upon the need for belief, but that need can no longer be fulfilled by traditional religion. “Christianity is an exhausted culture” (Stevens 1990, p. 202), he declares; “God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry” (Stevens 1990, p. 193). But if, as he insists, “The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself” (Stevens 1990, p. 188), then a problem arises. In the Adagia, as in much of his poetry, the question of belief is related to the poetic identity, the poet. But the question of poetry and belief arises for readers of poetry too. What does reading poetry do for us? Can we really believe that poetry makes life complete? Here, Stevens is suspended between two paradigms. “The poet is the intermediary between people and the world in which they live,” he asserts, “and, also, between people as between themselves; but not between people and some other world” (Stevens 1990, p. 189). Given the movement of Stevens’ aphorisms, we would assume that the poet does not serve as intermediary between people and some other world because there is no other world, because there is only “reality,” which is “the spirit’s true centre” (Stevens 1990, p. 201). But “[the] poet,” he also insists, “is the priest of the invisible” (Stevens 1990, p. 195), a notion also found in his poem “The Man on the Dump.” Stevens cannot dispense with the idea that the poet is a priest, engaging in sacramental rites of communion, even if these rites are solely of this world, material, and entirely human. They are social too, in that they are between people and themselves. Yet if the poet does not mediate between people and some other world, why is he still the priest of the invisible? What can be “invisible” and still be of this world? Or as the poet asks in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Whose spirit is this?” (Stevens 1954, p. 129).

Perhaps an answer may be found in Stevens’ late poem, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “We say God and the imagination are one…” (Stevens 1954, p. 524). Here, the union of the poet and his muse counteracts the poverty of a reality without poetry, without the idea of order. This union produces “a light, a power, the miraculous influence,” and in the grip of that power, the lovers “feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, / A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, // Within its vital boundary, in the mind.” That godlike power is the imagination, offering a vision of the cosmic order, and “out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air,/In which being there together is enough” (Stevens 1954, p. 524).

The idea that under the conditions of modernity, poetry can serve a redemptive purpose, both for poets themselves and for those who may read their poems, has more recently been explored in the work of Allen Grossman. In his Summa Lyrica, Grossman declares that “The poem has no other life than the relationships it facilitates, and these relationships reproduce the profoundest human covenant, which is the covenant of language through which they give and obtain the world simultaneously, and only obtain the world when they give” (Grossman 1992, p. 284). Under this covenant (and note how, like Stevens, Grossman appropriates religious terminology), the poet writes the poem and becomes “the person who has enacted the deed of presence” (Grossman 1992, p. 260). Like Stevens’ poet, who serves as an intermediary between people and their world, and between people and themselves, Grossman’s poet tries “to mediate a profounder, more gratifying, more magnanimous, more joyous sense of being toward persons in the world” (Grossman 1992, p. 21).

Unlike Stevens, however, Grossman does not see himself writing after the belief in God has been abandoned. As he puts it in the Introduction to How to Do Things with Tears, “The maxim of poetic thinking is: DO NOT BE CONTENT WITH AN IMAGINARY GOD” (Grossman 2001, p. xi). Grossman’s redemptive vision is dependent on his idiosyncratic understanding of Jewish identity, culture, history, and ritual,¹ but his “maxim” is in some respects universal, for it grounds poetic thinking, making it a fundamental human act: “poetic thinking is the thinking without which thinking fails of significance” (Grossman 2001, p. 97). Grossman’s religious poetry is as uncanny as his poetic thinking; it is the result of a mythopoesis that combines sublime prophetic utterance with vernacular humor and folksiness:

God says to himself, “What shall I do NOW?”

And then he says to me, “Grossman, you are

the only Jew that is. It’s up to you.”

So I ask him, ‘What happened to the rest

of the Jews. Then God says, ‘Put out the cat.’

—O kid! What shall I do? It is still dark

but the sky lightens over the machinery.

It’s up to us. ONE is not enough.

(Grossman 2001, p. 26)

In these lines from “Epistola,” Grossman’s God (who is something of a wise guy, something of a schlemiel) depends on the poet, “the only Jew that is,” to help maintain the machinery of creation, since “ONE is not enough”—contradicting the most basic of Jewish prayers, the Shema (“Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One”). In a longer poem, “Not all wanderers are lost,” “The God, before religion, / wept for himself, alone, among the sanctities.” But in a mutual relationship with humanity, “The Lord, Our God, teaches us how to do things / with tears” (Grossman 2001, p. 61), that is, “the common sadness of living and dying in the world” (Grossman 2001, p. xi). For the poet to enter into this redemptive project, an imaginary God is not enough.