# Quote — Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

> It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free — if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.

- Author: [Wallace Stevens](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens.md)
- Book: [The Necessary Angel](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens/the-necessary-angel.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wallace_Stevens#The_Necessary_Angel_(1951)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens/the-necessary-angel/it-may-be-dismissed

## More from this book

> Our own time, and by this I mean the last two or three generations, including our own, can be summed up in a way that brings into unity an immense number of details by saying of it that it is a time in which the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for some supremely acceptable fiction.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens/the-necessary-angel/our-own-time.md)

> The world about us would be desolate except for the world within us.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens/the-necessary-angel/the-world-about.md)

> What the poet has in mind ... is that poetic value is an intrinsic value. It is not the value of knowledge. It is not the value of faith. It is the value of imagination. The poet tries to exemplify it, in part as I have tried to exemplify it here, by identifying it with an imaginative activity that diffuses itself throughout our lives.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/wallace-stevens/the-necessary-angel/what-the-poet.md)