Spiritual Realism in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and Li-Young Lee

Throughout history, man found himself entrapped between the materiality of the physical world and the spirituality of the metaphysical one. Natural or man-made disasters that resulted in devastation and destruction in the wide world created not deformed bodies, but fragmented selves lost in the outer and the inner realms alike. Sharing a Christian background, Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955) and Li Young Lee (1957 - ) seem to have found two ways to comprehend the reason behind their existence: through the physical world (the other) and through the self. Comparing and contrasting the two poets is an attempt to underscore the odyssey each of them has taken to understand the external world. In search of being, Stevens and Lee have embarked on a lifelong journey following two distinct routes but heading towards the same destination: voyaging through the universe and flying within the spirit. By digging deep into their volumes, the book attempts to highlight the relationship between the self and the other in the poetry of Stevens and Lee.