24 pages 48 minutes read

Sunday Morning

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1915

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Summary and Study Guide

Overview

“Sunday Morning” is one of Wallace Stevens’s most famous works of poetry. The text is also one of the first poems Stevens ever published, appearing in a 1915 edition of Poetry magazine before its inclusion in Stevens’s first book, Harmonium (1923). The poem is a longer work of several sections, using stylistic references to 19th-century poetry to grapple with religious ideas. The poem is the first of many works Stevens wrote throughout his career that argues for a turn away from traditional, Christian ideology and toward an embrace of the immanent world of nature.

Poet Biography

Stevens was born to a prosperous Protestant family in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1879. Stevens grew up highly educated, even attending Harvard as a non-degree student for a few years as a teenager. In early adulthood, Stevens worked as a journalist before attending, and graduating from, New York Law School, becoming the third son in his family to earn a law degree. After several years of courting, Stevens married Elsie Viola Kachel, a woman whom his parents considered lower-class and lacking education. Because of his parents’ disapproval and refusal to attend the wedding, Stevens became estranged from his family for the remainder of his father’s life. Stevens lived and worked in New York City in law firms for several years, before switching into the insurance business and moving his family to Hartford, Connecticut.

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