Quote of the Day (Wallace Stevens, on the ‘Spiritual Role of the Poet’)

“My own way out toward the future involves a confidence in the spiritual role of the poet, who will somehow have to assist the painter, etc. (any artist, to tell the truth) in restoring to the imagination what it is losing at such a catastrophic pace.”— American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), letter to Henry Church, June 1, 1939, in Letters of Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens (1966)