Editing Wallace Stevens (section)

===Influence of Nietzsche===
Aspects of Stevens's thought and poetry draw from the writings of [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]. Stevens's poem "Description without Place," for example, directly mentions the philosopher:

{{poemquote|
Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool
Of these discolorations, mastering
The moving and the moving of their forms
In the much-mottled motion of blank time.<ref>Wallace Stevens, ''The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens'', p. 342.</ref>}}

Scholars have attempted to trace some of Nietzsche's influence on Stevens's thought. While Stevens's intellectual relationship to Nietzsche's is complex, it is clear that he shared Nietzsche's perspective on topics such as religion, change, and the individual. Milton J. Bates writes:

<blockquote>in a 1948 letter to Rodriguez Feo, [Stevens] expressed his autumnal mood with an allusion to Nietzsche: "How this oozing away hurts notwithstanding the pumpkins and the glaciale of frost and the onslaught of books and pictures and music and people. It is finished, Zarathustra says; and one goes to the Canoe Club and has a couple of Martinis and a pork chop and looks down the spaces of the river and participates in the disintegration, the decomposition, the rapt finale" (''L'' 621). Whatever Nietzsche would have thought of the Canoe Club and its cuisine, he would have appreciated the rest of the letter, which excoriates a world in which the weak affect to be strong and the strong keep silence, in which group living has all but eliminated men of character.<ref>Milton J. Bates, "Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 255.</ref></blockquote>