“In ‘Esthétique du Mal,’ one of his later poems, Wallace Stevens
considers existence from a variety of critical and philosophical
perspectives, among them various moral, aesthetic, political,
theological, and philosophic ‘epistemes’ that condition how humanity
perceives and experiences the world. These epistemological ‘modes’
dictate how we live and perceive the world about us, providing
preconceptions that shroud understanding and obfuscate ontological
explanation. What Stevens accomplishes in ‘Esthétique du Mal‘ is to
create a dialogue with various historical and philosophical ‘schools,’
systematically confronting and rejecting their perspectives, and
creating a movement toward Martin Heidegger’s ‘aletheia’ to uncover the
ontological substructure that exists beneath the individual’s
experience in the world. This movement of ‘uncovering’ and exposing the
nature of what it means ‘to be in the world’ is a journey to an
ontological substructure that allows Stevens to arrive at a dynamic,
ontological proof: that existence is full of ‘reverberating’
possibilities, not solitary and ‘univocal’ statements.”

– Conversations with the Dead:
The Ontological Substructure of
Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal“–
a 1999 Master’s thesis