Pastoral Nun, a

"A Pastoral Nun," a Stevens'poem from Transport to Summer, creates this aged character as one who, having attained a "present blessedness," claims that "poetry and apotheosis are one." Her reasons are that:
 If I live according to this law I live
 In an immense activity, in which
 
 Everything becomes morning, summer, the hero,
 The enraptured woman, the sequestered night,
 The man that suffered, lying there at ease,
 Without his envious pain in body, in mind,
 The favorable transformations of the wind
 As of a general being or human universe.
Of another illustration she makes of this claim, in which the two things (poetry and apotheosis) are compared for their "tight resemblances," the poems speaker only reveals that "each matters only in that which it conceives."
Stevens accomplishes several things with this character and these ideas. He hereticalizes the nun to an extent by acknowledging her religious piety then undercutting it by making her equate poetry with godhead (the act of apotheosis being an elevation to the condition of a deity). By placing this claim in her mouth, he redeploys her spiritual status to elevate the imagination to an all-embracing and circumscribing force on par with the nun's God. In fact, her description of her belief seems to suggest an accounting of all the world and all experience existing in a heaven-like state of fulfillment. Certainly there is a sense of hyperbole existing here, as well as a very idealistic ars poetica, but the sense is clear: poetry and the imagination are a replacement for the idea of God, a typical Stevens' assertion during this period. That the "resemblance" lies in what each concept "conceives" suggests that both poetry and God create the world in which we inhabit, give meaning and shape to it, and provide insight into its workings.