The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: 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: Quotes about imagination
Wallace Stevens was American poet. Explore interesting quotes on imagination.
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: What the poet has in mind... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.
“The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real.”
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination.
“Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
Context: 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...
“We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.”
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
Context: We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.
Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imaginedOn the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.</p
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
Harmonium (1923)
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
“Without a name and nothing to be desired,
If only imagined but imagined well.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract
"Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour"
Collected Poems (1954)
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
“The imagination is one of the forces of nature.”
Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia
The Necessary Angel (1951), Imagination as Value
“The first idea is an imagined thing.”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Be Abstract