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14 Edward Clarke, I The Later Affluence of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens i (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2012), 78. 15 Stevens to Bernard Heringman, 3 May 1949, in I Letters of Wallace Stevens i , ed. Focusing predominantly on the pertinence of pre-Socratic philosophy in Stevens's texts, Tompsett overlooks how Stevens's poetic technique influences or is influenced by these strands of thought, leading to reductive judgments such as "ethics are not a part of Stevens's aesthetic" (176). For the 131 most part, he overlooks how these philosophical elements inform, and are shaped by, Stevens's poetic practice.[9] Concentrating on another of Stevens's meditative texts, Dan Disney uses the attitude to poetic form suggested in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" as an exegesis of Plato, positing that poets create "a different style of attaching thinking and language."[10] But this insistence on getting back to Plato through Stevens coupled with a focus on matters of epistemology misinterprets how Stevens distances himself from conceiving of the poet's knowledge as transcendent; in other words, Stevens is not simply substituting one set of final principles for another. Wallace Stevens confronts Plato's rebuff of poetry head-on. [Extracted from the article]