I beg to differ …

… Wallace Stevens Wrote a Handful of Beautiful Poems and a Lot of Tosh - Washington Free Beacon.

This strikes me as quite wrong-headed. The writer does not seem to know that Stevens understood poetry as play as well as prophecy. "In the Carolinas," one of the poems cited, is really a blend of the two. Such blending in fact is common with Stevens. There is nothing obscene about "aspic nipples," at least if you know that aspic means a "savory meat jelly." For a baby, could he speak, the phrase would do. The last two lines would make perfect sense to Thomas Aquinas, with his notion that the knower and the known are one. As for "The Emperor of Ice-Cream," here's what Stevens wrote about it once: it "wears a deliberately commonplace costume, and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it." No hint of looking down on the poor there. And as for Stevens thinking that poetry might serve as a substitute for belief in God, he may have started with that as his premise, but I think that a close and regular reading of The Collected Poems reveals it to be the diary of a journey toward faith, which can only be reached after combat with doubt. On his trips to New York City, Stevens always made sure he had some time to spend just sitting quietly in St. Patrick's Cathedral.