# Quote — Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

> The best definition of true imagination is that it is the sum of our faculties. Poetry is the scholar's art. The acute intelligence of the imagination, the illimitable resources of its memory, its power to possess the moment it perceives — if we were speaking of light itself, and thinking of the relationship between objects and light, no further demonstration would be necessary ... What light requires a day to do, and by day I mean a kind of Biblical revolution of time, the imagination does in the twinkling of an eye. It colors, increases, brings to a beginning and end, invents languages, crushes men, and, for that matter, gods in its hands, it says to women more than it is possible to say, it rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact.

- 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/the-best-definition

## 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)