for the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman. During his years at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Stevens recalled little he liked except the subtly abstracted works of the Impressionist John Henry Twactman, whose influence is apparent in Stevens’ early landscapes. Other influences at that time included James Abbott McNeill Whistler. During a trip to Washington, D.C. in the early 1900s, Stevens discovered an exhibition of Chinese paintings on silk from the Sung Dynasty at the Freer Gallery. Stevens admired their abstract qualities. Regarding the bold black and white linearity, rendered with authority on such a tentative, soft ground, Stevens remarked, "I could not look at Sung without realizing that it had the same kind of philosophy that I had discovered in Whitman." Stevens clearly experienced in the Sung aspect of oriental art that which the impressionists found in Japanese prints, an affirmation of the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Art historian, Jessie Poesch wrote that, "the selection by the Sung artists of the salient essences of forms, rather than the explicit and detailed delineation of them, obviously appealed to Stevens, as did, apparently, the sense of line on the surface, the network of lines and forms that suggested distance, rather than clearly defined sense of recession found in most western painting up to the early twentieth century. Seeking more information on Oriental Art and philosophy, Stevens eventually came to the teachings of Lao-Tzu, in which Stevens saw creative parallels to the poetry of Walt Whitman. What Stevens felt all of these diverse sources held in common was an attitude toward the world, summed up in Stevens' own statement, "The best thing a human can do in life is to get rid of his separateness or selfness and hand himself over to the nature of things—to this mysterious thing called the Universal Order, that any artist must sense...In human nature we are consciously trying to achieve an order. And we are distressed by it, by the task of patterning it on an Order that is not personal or human—that is what I call spiritual." In the late 1920s and early 1930s during visits to New York Stevens discovered the works of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Their works, particularly, were a revelation, and confirmation of Stevens' own sense of aesthetic direction. Stevens began to work in a "non-objective" mode while he continued to produce his more