Stevens's Path to "Lebensweisheitspielerei".

Wallace Stevens's "Lebensweisheitspielerei," a late poem with a German title, exemplifies his spirituality of presence as it focuses on life as a concept. The poet's spiritual development gave rise to a spontaneous, improvisatory impulse to play that celebrates presence and calls into question the apparent bleakness of his earlier poems. Stevens's search for a "sun of fuller fire" is related to the Hegelian dialectic and Charles Altieri's recent attempt to secularize Hegel in Stevensian criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]