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The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

Book by Wallace Stevens · 3 quotes · Imagination, Poet, Poetry

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The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination Quotes

“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.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“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.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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“…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.”

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Book:The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination
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