Nietzsche, Friedrich

.Stevens and Nietzsche
Stevens always had trouble with Nietzsche, once calling him “one of the inventers of the dark nights of the soul” (Letters 863). Nietzsche’s emphasis on the perspectival nature of knowledge—that all knowledge is knowledge only from a certain viewpoint, a notion directly at odds with the Victorian concept of “objectivity”—seems to have been rejected entirely by Stevens. In a 1942 letter to Henry Church, Stevens writes:
 In his mind one does not see the world more clearly; both of us must often have felt how a strong mind distorts the world. Nietzsche’s mind was a perfect example of that sort of thing. Perhaps his effect was merely the effect of the epatant. The incessant job is to get into focus, not out of focus. Nietzsche is as perfect a means of getting out of focus as a little bit too much to drink.” (Letters 431-2).
Stevens’s opinions about Nietzsche had always disappointed Church, who, according to Alan Filreis, always felt that “his friend's error was perhaps in putting down The Genealogy of Morals before reading far enough into it.”
 Stevens does allude to Nietzsche in the poem “Description without Place.” Here are the lines in part III:
 Things are as they seemed to Calvin or to Anne
Of England, to Pablo Neruda in Ceylon,
To Nietzsche in Basel, to Lenin by a lake.
Filreis believes that, in a world without context, these great figures—Calvin, Anne Boleyn, Neruda, Nietzsche, Vladamir Lenin—are not historical figures of the first order, but merely random examples of individuals. The allusion from “Description without Place” serves two function. First, it treats Nietzsche via his biographical details, not within the philosophical realm of abstract ideas.  Secondly, the city of Basel in Switzerland had only a tangential relationship to Nietzsche. Rather, according to Filreis, Basel is the place where Stevens decided in 1945 “not to speak of poetry explicitly in the sense of history,” i.e., not to speak of poetry abstractly.
Filreis, Alan. Wallace Stevens and the Actual World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991. Web. 25 Feb 2014.