As a major American modern poet, Wallace Stevens deserves our careful reading. Stevens is quite different from T.S. Eliot. Eliot has depicted the spiritual Waste Land of modern man in his poetry and believed that Christianity is the only way to restore the lost center of mankind. Stevens, on the other hand, has accepted the fact that man no longer needs any external belief system to sustain him in the decentered world of ours. Stevens has written his poetry in the tradition of romanticism. But he is not an old guard romantic poet who believes in the supreme power of imagination. On the contrary, he thinks that poetry, the product of imagination and reality, is the supreme fiction. It means that he believes and at the same time disbelieves in the efficacy of poetry. To properly understand his poetry, we need a certain frame of reference to orient outselves. Nietzsche comes at the top of the list of people who form this frame of reference. He is the one who has set in motion some of the seminal ideas of modern philosophy which are helpful in understanding Stevens` poetry. Nietzsche views that the modern world is the locus where the tie between the signifier and the signified has been severed once and for all. This is the world about and in which Stevens` poetry is written. Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault take up the train of thought that Nietzsche has initiated. Martin Heidegger is also important in understanding Stevens` poetry. In reading his letters, we can see that Stevens is personally interested in Heidegger. Heidegger views that man is thrown in the world without any support system to sustain him. Man, therefore, has to recognize that he is open to Being. Being is the source and background of all beings and man as Dasein best reveals Being in the decentered world. Because there no longer exists the divine teleology in this kind of world, Being is also Nothing. Heidegger`s idea of Nothing is very similar to Sunyata (emptiness) in Zen Buddhism. Sunyata means Nothing, but this Nothing is not a negative nothing. Sunyata is a positive nothing where all beings originate and Being reveals itself. By setting up this frame of reference, we can better understand Wallace Stevens` poetry.