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The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination Paperback – February 12, 1965

by Wallace Stevens (Author)

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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.

Print length

192 pages
Language

English
Publication date

February 12, 1965
Dimensions

4.31 x 0.44 x 7.25 inches
ISBN-10

0394702786
ISBN-13

978-0394702780
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Few poets have written so characteristically about their own craft." --Perspective-U.S.A.

"These are rich essays, simply constructed yet richly and elegantly written." -- Hayden Carruth, The Nation

"The most welcome attribute of the book is its humane good sense, equally manifest whether Stevens is discussing a desolate Pennsylvania churchyard, Plato's images or the personalities of those who prefer 'a drizzle in Venice to a hard rain in Hartford.''' --New Republic

"It is a rare pleasure to breathe the atmosphere of confidence and wholeness which distinguishes the world of Wallace Stevens. Here we are refreshed by certainty without fragmentariness, by joyous possibilities without dishonesty. Here we find a moral and philosophical center through which reality may be repossessed and re-created with each new poetic act." -- The Hudson Review

From the Back Cover

"In this book, the first collection of his prose works, he accounts in scintillating language for the peculiarly modern and sometimes deliquescent fervor that has prompted his poems. Few poets have written so characteristically about their own craft." --Perspective --U.S.A.

"These are rich essays, simply constructed yet richly and elegantly written." -- Hayden Carruth, The Nation

"The most welcome attribute of the book is its humane good sense, equally manifest whether Stevens is discussing a desolate Pennsylvania churchyard. Plato's images or the personalities of those who prefer a drizzle in Venice to a hard rain in Hartford.''' --New Republic

"It is a rare pleasure to breathe the atmosphere of confidence and wholeness which distinguishes the world of Wallace Stevens. Here we are refreshed by certainty without fragmentariness, by joyous possibilities without dishonesty. Here we find a moral and philosophical center through which reality may be repossessed and re-created with each new poetic act." -- C. Roland Wagner, The Hudson Review

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group; Unabridged Edition (February 12, 1965)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394702786
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394702780
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.31 x 0.44 x 7.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #273,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #176 in Poetry Literary Criticism (Books)
- #737 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #2,733 in Short Stories Anthologies

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4.5 out of 5

63 global ratings

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Butch

The Role of Imagination in Re-Ordering the World.

Reviewed in the United States on April 13, 2021

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Rare coherent writing by an artist about art and the artists' role in re-imagining, re-ordering, and re-shaping the world.

2 people found this helpful

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Wolfcrow

Still a Classic

Reviewed in the United States on August 21, 2017

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I have carried this book with me for decades. Then I couldn't find it in my messy office, so I had to order a new one. Same cover, thank goodness. This book remains a classic Stevens.

3 people found this helpful

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Schnoodle

See a little bit further than you do.

Reviewed in the United States on October 24, 2017

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Excellent analysis of culture through a rare poet's eye. Well written but so intelligent I had to digest it about 10 pages at a sitting.

3 people found this helpful

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Paula Cappa Reviews

A rare and short book that has a sense of eternity

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2018

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A rare and thought-proving book on language, prose, poetry, art, painting, and creativity. “We live in the mind,” Stevens says in speaking about transmitting your imagination. There are moral and philosophical essays here and even the act of dying is examined. I especially liked his chapter on Imagination as Value. This is far more than a book about poets or poetry—Wallace Stevens being a poet who writes with grace and intelligence. I read this book along with his “The Collected Poems,” another compelling book to keep on the nightstand and read a poem a night. The thoughts in The Necessary Angel will certainly enlarge life and reality from the ordinary. His precise prose brings the action of the imagination into a deep perspective. It’s the kind of book you can open at random and find a line that opens you up as well.

5 people found this helpful

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Paul Hillman

Must read soulful intelligence.

Reviewed in the United States on September 24, 2013

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Excellent! Clear, intellegent and original for its time. Philosophy for the artistic, well educated set. An essential for any spiritual or philosophic library.

8 people found this helpful

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Digital Madness

LOVE THAT POET!

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2017

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Another great book! Wallace Stevens is brilliant.

2 people found this helpful

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Will

A necessary "Illusion"? =?

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2016

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This book throws much needed light on what Stevens is up to in his poetry! I am intrigued by his declared desire to make a poetry that can do the work of religion, theology, and metaphysics. I more or less agree with his diagnosis of the problem of religious LITERALISM, but think his prescription inadequate. He seeks to supplant religious tradition; a more humble and sophisticated project would be to translate or transpose traditional myth, metaphor, symbol, and analogy into a different key! What would we think of HIS poems if we read them with the same lack of Imagination and sophistication with which he approaches biblical texts and theological discourse? His AN ORDINARY EVENING IN NEW HAVEN, XVIII: “say good-bye to the past … live in the present… paint in the present … not the state of thirty years ago.” Tantamount to saying: Cezanne and Klee are great; therefore, Vermeer, Bruegel, and Constable are no longer viable models. He has many thought-provoking passages, and enriching allusions to artifacts of high culture. But his drive toward a “Necessary Illusion” ["Illusion"=?] is littered with unnecessary incoherences and self-contradictions.

His poem LES PLUS BELLES PAGES: “Aquinas spoke of God. I changed the word to man.” What does Stevens mean by "God"? How pedestrian, ethnocentric, and ignorant of the relevant disciplines can one be? For all his sophistication, he seems as ignorant of what he rejects as are the pop atheists like Richard Dawkins whose scientistic materialism is as fundamentalistic as are the religious fundamentalists in their literalism. ’

His poem SUNDAY MORNING: When earth is all the paradise we shall know, “The sky will be much friendlier then than now.” This is perhaps a misreading of Dante, etc. or a relativist rejection of objective moral judgments—in which case a swift kick to his shins will unmask him, in another of his brazen self-contradictions. Some of his passages seem to degenerate into something like psychiatric “word-salad."

What to make of the fact that, by some accounts Stevens died a baptized Roman Catholic? He said the God he worshiped In St. Patrick's Cathedral was not the God he met in a walk in the woods. Why not? Countless popular hymns bridge the gap quite nicely.

4 people found this helpful

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kh

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 19, 2015

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A must-read.

3 people found this helpful

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shotenzenjin

Great insight

Reviewed in Japan on May 4, 2020

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Essential reading for fans of Wallace Stevens’ poetry and now available for less than a dollar!

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 29, 2016

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perfect

BioDiplomacy

An Archangel Imagines the Need to Engage with Reality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 21, 2013

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Wallace Stevens is the great poet of the faculty of the imagination. Here, as an essayist, he takes us canoeing down its river on a journey where one needs to follow every bend, attentive to the sounds and sights on either bank, but always careful to steer accurately, aware of the dangers of capsizing. His prose, like his poetry, is dense with detail and tingling with excitement. But this is the canoe, his poetry is the river. He insists, in the first of "Three Academic Pieces", that "The accuracy of accurate letters is an accuracy with respect to the structure of reality." One way to formulate an "accurate theory of poetry" is "to examine one of the significant components of the the structure of reality - that is to say, the resemblance between things."

This idea becomes the poetry of the second piece, "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together":

He must say nothing of the fruit that is
Not true, nor think it, less. He must defy
The metaphor that murders metaphor.

The third piece, "Of Ideal Time and Choice",is why I treasure this collection of seven essays that were - all but one - written to be spoken to live audiences. (Oh, to have been one of the auditors!). It contains this passage of reflective honesty, stunning even when plucked out untimely from the poem in which is is embedded:

"And old men who have chosen, and are cold

Because what they have chosen is their choice
No more..."

2 people found this helpful

Frank 9

A gem for lovers of contemplative art

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2016

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This profound & elegant little book arrived in no time and in perfect condition. For anyone interested in contemplative poetry that circles beautifully in explorations of aesthetics and metaphysics, this book is a detailed thoughtful essay on the subject by the master of that kind of poetry . Stevens prose style is as polished and pointed as his poetry.

One person found this helpful

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