"If one no longer believes in God (as truth)", Wallace Stevens once wrote, "it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else."

For Stevens, born into an affluent family in Pennsylvania in 1879, that "something else" was poetry, conceived of as an independent quest for meaning. This "belief" underpins his late poem, "Presence of an External Master of Knowledge"; the poem also relates to Tennyson's "Ulysses" (1842), whose ageing narrator resolves to "follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought".

TheTLS published "Presence of an External Master of Knowledge in Stevens's seventy-fifth year, in 1954. He died the following summer.

Presence of an External Master of Knowledge

Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, "As I know, I am and have
The right to be." He guided his boat
Beneath the middle stars and said:

"Here I feel the human loneliness
And that, in space and solitude,
Which knowledge is: the world and fate,
The right within me and about me,
Joined in a triumphant vigor,
Like a direction on which I depend . . .

A longer, deeper breath sustains
This eloquence of right, since knowing
And being are one – the right to know
Is equal to the right to be.
The great Omnium descends on me,
Like an absolute out of this eloquence."

The sharp sail of Ulysses seemed,
In the breathings of that soliloquy,
Alive with an enigma's flittering,
And bodying, and being there,
As he moved, straightly, on and on
Through clumped stars dangling all the way.

WALLACE STEVENS (1954)

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