“The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art.”

— Wallace Stevens

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...

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art." by Wallace Stevens?

Wallace Stevens 278

American poet 1879–1955

Related quotes

“I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose = words in their best order; poetry = the best words in their best order.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

12 July 1827
Table Talk (1821–1834)

“True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Portraits and Aphorisms (1903), Pretexts

“Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

The Life of Milton
Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)

“I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but that if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty … to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb.”

Ursula K. Le Guin book The Language of the Night

And never under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.
"Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" https://books.google.com/books?id=ksOjjuy3issC&pg=PA44, in The Language of the Night (1979), p. 44

“Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations.”

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919) American artist, writer and activist

These Are My Rivers: New & Selected Poems, 1955-1993 (New Directions) ISBN: 0-0112-1273-4 0-0112-1252-1

“Philosophers and aestheticians may offer elegant and profound definitions of art and beauty, but for the painter they are all summed up in this phrase: To create a harmony”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quoted in: Clint Brown (1998) Artist to Artist, p. 32

“Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

January 26, 1840
Journals (1838-1859)
Context: Poetry — No definition of poetry is adequate unless it be poetry itself. The most accurate analysis by the rarest wisdom is yet insufficient, and the poet will instantly prove it false by setting aside its requisitions. It is indeed all that we do not know. The poet does not need to see how meadows are something else than earth, grass, and water, but how they are thus much. He does not need discover that potato blows are as beautiful as violets, as the farmer thinks, but only how good potato blows are. The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground. It has a logic more severe than the logician's. You might as well think to go in pursuit of the rainbow, and embrace it on the next hill, as to embrace the whole of poetry even in thought.

“If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not?”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

“Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination.”

Max Planck (1858–1947) German theoretical physicist

As quoted in Advances in Biochemical Psychopharmacology, Vol. 25 (1980), p. 3

“Suggest always put Islamic "scholar" in quotes, to avoid insulting true scholars. True scholars have read more than one book.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/492729120418430976 (25 July 2014)
Twitter

“The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art.”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Wallace Stevens 278

Related quotes

Related topics