Finished reading: The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imaginat… by Wallace Stevens 📚
What I appreciated most were the times Stevens leaned into the spiritual; the faith and hope underwriting his claims for poetry. His conviction that the imagination presses back against reality is genuinely felt, but it begins to break when he reaches for grand generalizations; the philosophy lands better where he trusts the image over the argument. The poet as orator of the imagination is a special moment. And the sign he quotes at the garden entrance in Tarbes:
It is forbidden
To enter in the garden
Carrying Flowers
Also want to note:
“There has been an age / When a pineapple on the table was enough,” 🍍