The Necessary Angel Quotes

“Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“I am the truth, since I am part of what is real, but neither more nor less than those around me.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“The great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“... unreal things have a reality of their own, in poetry as elsewhere.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a
violence without It is the imagination pressing back
against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“The statement that the process does not involve the poet as subject, to the extent to which that is true, precludes direct egotism. On the other hand, without indirect egotism there can be no poetry. There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found and why, in short, there is none.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar’s art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary … What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact… — Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (Vintage; Unabridged Edition, February 12, 1965)”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. The mind has added nothing to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without It is the imagination pressing back
against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do wIth our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“We cannot look at the past or the future except by means of the imagination but again the imagination of backward glances is one thing and the imagination of looks ahead something else. Even the psychologists concede this present particular, for, with them, memory involves a reproductive power, and looks ahead involve a creative power: the power of our expectations.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“Poetry is a satisfying of the desire for resemblance. As the mere satisfying of a desire, it is pleasurable. But poetry if it did nothing but satisfy a desire would not rise above the level of many lesser things. Its singularity is that in the act of satisfying the desire for resemblance it touches the sense of reality, it enhances the sense of reality, heightens it, intensifies it.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

“…the imagination gives to everything that it touches a peculiarity, and it seems to me that the peculiarity of the imagination is nobility, of which there are many degrees. This inherent nobility is the natural source of another, which our extremely headstrong generation regards as false and decadent. I mean that nobility which is our spiritual height and depth; and while I know how difficult it is to express it, nevertheless I am bound to give a sense of it. Nothing could be more evasive and inaccessible. Nothing distorts itself and seeks disguise more quickly. There is a shame of disclosing it and in its definite presentations a horror of it. But there it is.”
― Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination