This book studies Wallace Stevens and pre-Socratic philosophy, showing how concepts that animate Stevens' poetry parallel concepts and techniques found in the poetic works of Parmenides, Empedocles, and Xenophanes, and in the fragments of Heraclitus.

Introduction Part I: Wallace Stevens, Pre-Socratic Philosophy and Ontological Literature 1. Approaching the Poetics of Being 2. The Ontological Experience of the Work of Art Part II: Wallace Stevens (1923 - 1942), Pre-Socratic Philosophy, and Immanuel Kant 3. After Kant: The Attempt to Experience the 'Thing-In-Itself' through the Pre-Socratic Element in the Philosophy of Art 4. Polemos and the Violent Nature of the 'Thing-in-Itself' Part III: Wallace Stevens (1947-1955) , Pre-Socratic Philosophy, and Immanuel Kant 5. A Pre-Socratic Sense of Being as the Universal 'Thing-in-Itself' 6. Death and Rebirth in the Universal 'Thing-in-Itself' Part IV: Wallace Stevens, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, and Religion 7. Poetry and Religion: 'Major Man' as Poetic Saviour 8. The 'Supreme Fiction' as the Transvaluation of Religion with Poetry Part V: Wallace Stevens, Pre-Socratic Philosophy, Violence, and Mythology 9. The Violence of a Reduction of Metaphysics in Wallace Stevens' Poetry 10. Stevens' Goddess and the Mythological Nature of Being as a 'Oneness' Conclusion