The true inheritance, if we are able to see it, is a world already transformed, the lucid realization of one among infinite possibilities of transformation, of projection from the shadowy presence at the center. Concerning this he quoted from Whitehead these rather cryptic words: “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times, for every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location.” His comment on this: “These words [he says] are pretty obviously words from a level where everything is poetic, as if the statement that every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location produced in the imagination a universal iridesence, a dithering of presences and, say, a complex of differences.”
For some poets . . . the writing of poetry may become an elucidation of character, a spiritual exercise having for its chief object the discovery or invention of one’s character: Myself must I remake, Du musst dein Leben ändern, &c. Something of this sort appears in our poet also, and he said about it: “It’s the explanation of things that we make to ourselves that disclose our character; the subjects of one’s poems are the symbols of one’s self or of one of one’s selves.”
— From “The Bread of Faithful Speech—Wallace Stevens and the Voices of Imagination”