Early Christianity in late Stevens
pp. 95-106
in: Bart Eeckhout, Edward Ragg (eds), Wallace Stevens across the atlantic, Berlin, Springer, 2008Abstract
"Jerome / Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings' (CPP 344): I have always thought this line from "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' was an excellent example of how merciless Wallace Stevens could be to his readers. Was Jerome, perhaps, someone he knew in Hartford, like Naaman of "Certain Phenomena of Sound', who had wandered into Stevens' great Modernist meditation through pure serendipity? A few lines further down there is mention of a "bleakest ancestor': perhaps Jerome is related to old John Zeller, someone from Stevens' family in Pennsylvania?
