Yale professor Langdon Hammer devotes this lecture from Modern Poetry (ENGL 310) to Wallace Stevens, presenting him as an unabashedly Romantic poet of imagination searching for meaning in a world without religion. Hammer works closely through three poems: he reads "Sunday Morning" alongside Hart Crane's comparable quest for symbol and significance, then turns to "The Poems of Our Climate" to trace Stevens's impulse to reduce poetry to bare essentials and his simultaneous resistance to that reduction. The lecture closes with "The Man on the Dump," treated as a characteristic Stevensian effort to locate truth in language itself rather than in the world language describes. Recorded in spring 2007 as part of Yale's Open Yale Courses initiative, the talk moves slowly through the texts, quoting extensively and building its argument line by line rather than summarizing themes from a distance.