The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

by Wallace Stevens

Book Overview

In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Stevens reflects upon his art. His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction, his ambition in these various pieces, published in different times and places, aimed higher than that, in the direction of disclosing poetry itself, the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words. Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394702786
• ISBN13: 9780394702780
• Release Date: February 1965
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 4.4" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Trust the tale not the teller

Few are the great poets who construct a critical edifice worthy of bearing attention similar to that of their poetry. Wordsworth and Coleridge do this in 'The Lyrical Ballads' and Keats does it in his Letters. Stevens a poet of extraordinary exuberance and richness constructs in these essays a kind of master -guide to own aesthetic and fundamental principles. His conception of a Reality- forming Imagination capable of transforming what it senses into supreme fictions, hints at what his own Art is all about. But the line - by- line beauty of his poetry and its deep transforming often hypnotic music have no real parallel in his prose. Prose explains and poetry reveals more than any explanation can give. The Essays can be a help to the reader of the Poetry, but it is the Poetry that it is the Essential Art.