Wallace Stevens's perspective
... he was the rare American artist who never traveled abroad but instead experienced "the heaven of Europe" secondhand ...
It's interesting that Stevens never traveled to Europe himself, and I can't help but wonder if this may have had an impact on his writing.
Poetry, in Stevens's mind, is "the supreme fiction," the single essence that can replace a lost belief in God as a source of life's redemption.
Having chosen Stevens's "The Brave Man" as a poem for personal critique, I would have to argue that he intended poetry not to "replace" God as a source of redemption, but rather as a method of restoring and reinforcing Him as such.