The Necessary Angel by Wallace Stevens

Greetings all!
Come join us as we go through the works of poet Wallace Stevens! For this group of meetings we'll go through his nonfiction work, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. It'll be a short meetup, so please prepared with thoughts to share. The meeting will be text-based, and will stick to what we've read as a group up to that point. I'll be using the Modern Library edition of his Collected Prose and Poetry. It's a pricey book, but if you can grab it, it will help us direct each other to specific citations in the text.

Here's the schedule:

M1: The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

M2: The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet

M3: Three academic pieces & Effects of Analogy

M4: Imagination as Value

M5: The relations between poetry and painting

About the text:


The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951) by Wallace Stevens is a collection of essays exploring the relationship between reality and imagination, themes Stevens often explored in his poetry. In these essays, Stevens delves into how the imagination shapes our perception of reality, arguing that it is essential to human experience and artistic creation. He suggests that imagination does not merely embellish reality; it creates meaning and beauty, enriching human life and offering a refuge in a mundane world.

Through essays like “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” and “Imagination as Value,” Stevens presents his belief that imagination is not a form of escapism but a necessary element of consciousness that helps people make sense of their existence. He views the poet’s role as vital in society, as poets give voice to the unseen and unrealized aspects of reality. The essays reflect Stevens’ philosophical musings on art, perception, and the complex interaction between the world as it is and the world as we imagine it to be.