The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

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.