ABSTRACT
To understand the framework in presenting what Stevens' called the two necessary angels of verse, the angel of the imagination and the angel of reality, we might confirm the intellectual context by quoting Gottfried Benn who lived through the peak period of modernist activity. For the theorizing poet such terms, imagination and reality, have definitions which are multiple and belong in the context of their use altogether. As in a marriage they have more meaning together than apart. "Nothing" can be accepted on those terms without great outcry. If it is possible to thought or the imagination, it is therefore an experience; perhaps others will come with it, or despite it. To achieve "reality" was to gain a shape; the imagination's "unique power is to give created forms actual existence". He would resolve difficulties by asserting that reality is the quality of "independent existence", something that is the possession of nature as well as themselves.
