Sunday Morning

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot (1915)

This long, Modernist poem was published the same year as Stevens’s own long Modernist work, “Sunday Morning.” Arguably the most read English Modernist poem, this text provides an interesting counterpoint to Stevens’s poetry. While “Sunday Morning” proceeds measuredly, heavily drawing on Romantic poetry techniques and styles, Eliot engages with the poetic tradition by making a more radical collage of influences. Both poems deal with the imaginative upheaval of the day, but they use different thematic lenses and different literary styles.

“A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” by Wallace Stevens (1923)

This poem appeared in Stevens’s first collection, Harmonium, in which “Sunday Morning” was also published. While shorter and more humorous than “Sunday Morning,” this text also challenges traditional Christian religious thinking, substituting poetry as an ideological replacement.

“Epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds” by John Keats (1818)

John Keats wrote this verse letter in the early-19th century, and it is a fantastic example of the Romantic verse that inspires Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” In the epistle, Keats grapples with the gap between the harmony and brutality of nature in the face of his brother’s terminal illness.