"Sunday Morning" at 100

"Wallace Stevens�s �Sunday Morning� (1915) is a lofty poetic meditation�almost a philosophical discourse�rooted in a few basic questions: what happens to us when we die? Can we believe seriously in an afterlife? If we can�t, what comfort can we take in the only life we get? As World War I intensified and Stevens neared middle age, he broached these subjects with quiet urgency in a poem as beautiful as it is difficult. 

Although �Sunday Morning� is considered Stevens�s breakthrough poem, it wasn�t published until he was 36. It debuted in Poetry magazine during a year that brought several other Modernist milestones, including T.S. Eliot�s �The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,� Marianne Moore�s first professionally published poems, and a major Imagist anthology coedited by the poets Richard Aldington and H.D. Compared with these experiments by younger writers�and with many of the poems later collected in Stevens�s first book,  Harmonium (1923)��Sunday Morning� innovates in a mellower and statelier mode. "

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The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens