"The Doctor of Geneva" is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry, Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

 (1923). The poem was first published in 1921, so it is free of copyright.

The Doctor of Geneva  The doctor of Geneva stamped the sand  That lay impounding the Pacific swell,  Patted his stove-pipe hat and tugged his shawl.  Lacustrine man had never been assailed  By such long-rolling opulent cataracts,  Unless Racine or Bossuet held the like.  He did not quail. A man who used to plumb  The multifarious heavens felt no awe  Before these visible, voluble delugings,  Which yet found means to set his simmering mind  Spinning and hissing with oracular  Notations of the wild, the ruinous waste,  Until the steeples of his city clanked and sprang  In an unburgherly apocalypse.  The doctor used his handkerchief and sighed.

The doctor of Geneva, perhaps a doctor like John Calvin

John Calvin

John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...

 used to plumbing
the depths of religious doctrine, is shaken by his encounter with the
raw power of the Pacific Ocean

Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean is the largest of the Earth's oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south, bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, and the Americas in the east.At 165.2 million square kilometres in area, this largest division of the World...

. A native of Geneva

Geneva

Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...

 used to its landlocked
lakes, he is also more familiar with Racine

Jean Racine

Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...

's tragedies or Bossuet

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet was a French bishop and theologian, renowned for his sermons and other addresses. He has been considered by many to be one of the most brilliant orators of all time and a masterly French stylist....

's
rhetoric than the high-rolling waves that pound the shore where he
stands. Though professing no awe, he finds that his old European mind suffers an
"unburgherly apocalypse" by his encounter with the art of the New
World. Stevens is self-consciously contributing experiments towards a burgeoning
American art that may cause traditionalists to use their handkerchiefs and sigh. Vendler

Helen Vendler

Helen Hennessy Vendler is a leading American critic of poetry.-Life and career:Vendler has written books on Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, and Seamus Heaney. She has been a professor of English at Harvard University since 1984; between 1981 and 1984 she taught...

 sees this as one of Stevens's major themes.

On this reading the poem bears special comparison to The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage

"The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium. It was first published in the 1919, so it is in the public domain...

 and Ploughing on Sunday

Ploughing on Sunday

Ploughing on Sunday is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first book of poetry, Harmonium . It was first published in 1919 and is therefore in the public domain....

.

A letter from Stevens to an Austrian visitor to America returning to his home in Vienna, may be compared to the poem.

I was tempted to improvise a reply to the question regarding food for the imagination in this country. It is what it is in any country: reality. It is true that reality over here is different from the reality to which you are accustomed. It is also true that it not only changes from place to place, but from time to time and that in every place and at every time the imagination makes its way by reason of it. This is a simple and unrhetorical answer to your question. A man is not bothered by the reality to which he is accustomed, that is to say, in the midst of which he has been born. He may be very much disturbed by reality elsewhere, but even as to that it would be only a question of time. You are just as likely as not when you return to Vienna to be horrified by what you may consider to be extraordinary change or series of changes.