“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?
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Wallace Stevens 278
American poet 1879–1955Related quotes
“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast.”
The Destruction of Sennacherib, st. 3.
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
Source: Selected Poems
(31st January 1829) Lines to the Author after Reading the Sorrows of Rosalie
The London Literary Gazette, 1829
"Lamia", Pt. II, l. 229
Poems (1820)
“A beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”
On Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron
Essays in Criticism, second series (1888)
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight
“Some are haunted by ghosts. I am haunted by stories.”
The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), afterword to "Kevin Malone", p. 355
Nonfiction
“By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,”
"Dreamland", st. 1 (1845).
Context: By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule —
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE — out of TIME.
