Wallace Stevens
The poet Wallace Stevens is said to have been baptized a Catholic during his last days suffering from stomach cancer. This account is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly, and critic, Helen Vendler, who, in a letter to James Wm. Chichetto, thought Fr. Arthur Hanley was "forgetful" since "he was interviewed twenty years after Stevens' death." In his response, Chichetto noted that Vendler ignored "the testimony of Dr. Edward Sennett (in charge of the Radiology Dept. at St. Francis Hospital when Stevens was admitted both times) and the Sisters with whom he talked in 1977 (and later) who believed Fr. Hanley's account."
Read more about this topic: Deathbed Conversion, Suggested Deathbed Conversions
Famous quotes by wallace stevens:
“The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow. . . .”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“We do not prove the existence of the poem.
It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
A little and a little, suddenly,
By means of a separate sense. It is and it
Is not and, therefore, is.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“‘Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds,
O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon,
There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing,
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.’”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)