Hume's empiricist analysis of belief — as a lively idea associated with a present impression — challenges poetry that claims belief in transcendent realities, and poets like Hardy responded with a rigorous honesty about the impossibility of sustaining traditional religious belief; In "In Memoriam," Tennyson dramatizes the philosophical struggle to maintain belief in immortality and providential order in the face of grief and geological time, making the long poem a philosophical investigation of the conditions and limits of belief; Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" raises the question of aesthetic belief — can the beauty of the artwork ground a belief in truth? — enacting the philosophical tension between aesthetic experience and propositional knowledge; William James's pragmatist philosophy of belief — the "will to believe," the idea that beliefs are tools for living rather than mirrors of reality — has influenced American poets who treat poetic affirmations not as metaphysical claims but as enabling fictions; A poet in a secular age might explore what Coleridge called "willing suspension of disbelief" as a philosophical model for all belief — not just aesthetic, but religious, political, and interpersonal — making the poem a meditation on the conditions of trust; Wallace Stevens's "supreme fiction" is precisely a philosophical account of belief after the death of God — the poet must construct beliefs knowing them to be fictions, sustaining them not because they are true but because they are necessary