The greatest poverty is not to live
In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire
Is too difficult to tell from despair.

Stevens frames “poverty” not as material lack but as a diminished capacity to inhabit reality with a sustaining imagination. To “live / In a physical world” is not merely to exist among objects, but to feel one’s desires as intelligible and livable rather than as a blur of longing and hopelessness. When desire becomes “too difficult to tell from despair,” aspiration collapses into negation; the inner life loses its power to shape meaning. The lines echo Stevens’s recurring concern that the imagination must continually remake the world so that reality remains bearable and vivid—without that remaking, the self experiences a kind of spiritual destitution.