One of the puzzles of Wallace Stevens’s “Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion” is how Ludwig Richter could unleash the articulate “brutality” of some of Stevens’s “harshest lines” (Helen Vendler). Much of the poem’s explosive energy can be more readily related to Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem’s circumstances, images, metaphors, and (to a lesser extent) theme(s) readily link with those in Rilke’s exploration of divine relations with humanity as he contemplated an aesthetic embodiment of medieval Christian faith: “L’Ange du Méridien,” from his Cathedral Cycle in Neue Gedichte/New Poems (1907). After examining these intersections, I will link them to Surrealism, whose excesses are sourced, by Stevens, in Richter. And, at least implicitly, “something more / Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter”—the energizing source for Stevens’s own surrealistic poem—is located in Rilke. This aspect, amidst a thick intertextuality, indicates that it is quite plausible, if not likely, that Stevens is responding to Rilke’s poem.
Clay Daniel (Mon,) studied this question.