ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Stevens's late poetry with the Anglo-Irish novelist Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea and The Message to the Planet. By reading the common presentations of senescence and the limits of the imagination in poet and novelist, I demonstrate how Stevens adopts a position of relinquishment and acceptance which also becomes crucial to Murdoch's moral psychology as laid out in the two novels. Stevens and Murdoch outline an ethics of relationality which stresses the importance of letting the otherness of the world persists in its otherness, while exploring how art can usefully cope with final finitude and the limits of the temporal self.
