Customer Reviews

The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

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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.

Perhaps the most significant work of philosophy in English in the 20th century.

Stevens works in the same field as Maurice Blanchot and the later Heidegger, with two caveats:

1. He writes exceptionally clear and elegant English, and

2. He is a real poet.

What he has to say about the relation of reality and the imagination provides the clearest sense of what Heidegger is getting at in speaking of absence and presence, and what Blanchot means by l'espace litteraire.

These essays also provide a way into some of Stevens' own crucial poems, like The Man with the Blue Guitar, and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.

Any critic who ignores this work (talking about you, Harold Bloom), or mangles it (Helen Vendler) cannot possibly understand what Stevens' poetry is about.

Postscript: After writing this review, I subsequently read through the unabridged version of Wallace Stevens' letters. I was quite pleased to note that in several letters written in the 1950s, he inquires of Peter Lee, a young poet and friend of his who lived for some time in Fribourg, whether he has encountered Heidegger there. In another letter, he asks his Parisian bookseller, Paule Vidal, to send him a copy of a recent book of Heidegger's on the German poet Holderlin. And in another letter, he states simply that he "loves" Maurice Blanchot.

For one thing, this shows that he was one of the first Americans to have read the work of Blanchot and the later Heidegger, possibly as early as the 1930s but certainly by the 1940s. Consider that even the most avant garde university intellectuals did not begin reading them in this country until the 1970s. But even more, this shows that Stevens felt a very strong affinity with Blanchot's writing on literature, and I believe he felt Blanchot's work expressing ideas similar to his own. And he may well have felt the same about Heidegger.