Wallace Stevens Handout Wallace Stevens on the Imagination, etc. The mind of the poet describes itself as constantly in his poems as the mind of the sculptor describes itself in his forms. . We are concerned with the whole personality. . . . Here we are on the border of the question of the relationship between the imagination and memory, which we avoid. It is important to believe that the visible is the equivalent of the invisible.
Poetry is the scholar's art.
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. The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.