" Deliciae of the Spirit": Stevens, Villon, and "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting"

In "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting," Wallace Stevens examines the methods of modernist painters Jacques Villon, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque and addresses his artistic affinity as a poet with their creative processes. There and elsewhere, Stevens identifies both painter and poet as seekers of a "spiritual fund" beyond outward appearances, imaginatively constructing a modern reality. Stevens's responses to Villon's La Femme au Hamac and La Table Servie reveal a shared aesthetic grounded in transformation; Stevensian decreation is analogous to what Villon calls constructive decomposition. Both artists dismantle and recompose reality to make the familiar newly strange. Readings of the poems "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch" and "Poem Written at Morning" reflect Stevens's affinity with modernist painters' transformation of reality. In this confluence of vision and method, Stevens locates art's highest purpose: to move beyond sensual pleasures toward delights of the spirit.