A High-Toned Old Christian Woman by Wallace Stevens (read by Tom O'Bedlam)

He said "The poem must resist the intelligence, almost successfully". Much of what he wrote does successfully resist my intelligence but I think I detect an element of sly humour in it. Stevens was about 43 when he wrote it - the photograph shows him at about that age.

His upbringing was what some people call "religiose", meaning strictly religious, and that might have caused him to rebel. It's impossible to argue against people with strong beliefs, who are certain they are right, so it is tempting to tell them that poetry is in an alternate universe with its own rules and in that universe it is permissible to take an unholy delight in mocking people who have religious beliefs. Perhaps. Or perhaps he's resisting my intelligence again.

He was a complex character, a successful businessman, never truly happy it seems, sometimes belligerent and sometimes drunk. He turned Robert Frost into a bitter enemy and he punched Ernest Hemingway, breaking his own hand, but Hemingway easily defeated him.

Plenty has been written about the poem, the poet and his history.
"O let us never, never doubt what nobody is sure about" - that's from the Mikado, I think.

The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens is in Google books. You can't read the whole thing, but you can read a substantial amount of it to give you some idea of what his life was like.
There is also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_High-Toned_Old_Christian_Woman
http://www.floridabookreview.com/id64.html
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/stevens/christian.htm
http://www.wallacestevensbiography.com/photos-of-the-poet.htm

The pictures are of his mother Maragaretha Catharine Stevens and his wife Elsie who, even if they were not the HIgh Toned Old Christian Woman referred to in the poem, certainly contributed to the way he felt about such women.

Woman with cithern, 1677 by Pieter van Slingeland (ca. 1630-1691).

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

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