ABSTRACT
Both Wallace Stevens and José Ángel Valente showed a great interest in the relations between poetry and painting, as some of their essays attest. Painting was a means to open up new provinces in poetry. For this purpose, they looked towards Paul Klee’s paintings and aesthetic writings, in particular “Creative Credo.” His main tenet was the idea of revelation. Both Stevens and Valente adopted this idea as a core concept of their poetics. However, each of them responded in a very personal way to Klee’s inspiration. While Stevens scarcely mentioned Klee and adapted Klee’s idea of making visible to his notion of decreation, Valente showed a wider knowledge of Klee’s aesthetics, much mediated by Benjamin’s interpretation of Klee’s Angelus Novus, and developed during his career an understanding of Klee’s angel that is more nuanced than Stevens’.
