John Muckle:
>"the quasi religiosity of believing in a fiction which you know to be a fiction"<

Hi John, don't think we've talked here before. I have the same copy of the poem as Edward in 'Forces of Imagination' with the ref to the Amsterdam museum. A beautiful poem. Of course you are referring to Stevens above and by implication Guest, and I would agree. The sense of an internal paradise, a fiction or a poetry - almost a conflation of the two concepts - infuses all of Guest's later work but I'm not sure if it is 'quasi religious', at least not in the sense that some young post-Language American writers are coming across as quasi-religious. For me Barbara Guest's work is supremely materialist in that it does not depend upon or point to anything external to human language, whereas in what I WOULD call quasi-religious poetry there is an impression given that the language and what it does is just a surface sheen riding upon a wave of something sacred, deep, or what have you.

Tim A.