Shades of Bliss: Imagining Heaven in Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra” describes fountains which embody different conceptions of human virtue expressed in contrasting religious systems. Wallace Stevens’s “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” similarly contrasts conceptions of virtue with reference to worship-spaces taken as embodying the assumptions of competing religious systems. Stevens’s speaker reaches the somewhat Nietzschean, somewhat Freudian conclusion that religious practice merely projects human desires; differences are relatively meaningless. Wilbur’s speaker, developing Christian theological openness to the other, concludes that the differences between religions make possible a productive complementarity