Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script.

                             Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.

It has to face the men of the time and to meet

The women of the time. It has to think about war

And it has to find what will suffice. It has

To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear,

In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,

Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound

Of which, an invisible audience listens,

Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of two

Emotions becoming one. The actor is

A metaphysician in the dark, twanging

An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives

Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly

Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,

Beyond which it has no will to rise.

          It must

Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may

Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman

Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

The title says it all. Of Modern Poetry is a manifesto on how modern poetry should be according to Stevens. Some criteria he states in the poem, some he shows.

In the first stanza, we encounter the idea of sufficiency immediately. Poetry is the art of finding what will suffice: ideas and/or words. This process takes action in the mind. This is emphasized very much in the poem. We can derive a definition of poetry certainly here: poetry is the proper using of proper words, just enough to convey the idea or the emotion. By emphasizing the process taking place in the mind, I think Stevens additionally proposes that both ideas and emotions happen, through the acts of the mind.

Then, are emotions more logical than we think? Or does the mind work in more emotional ways than we think it does? In the second stanza, modern poetry is tied to being interested in living, speech and being human. The emphasis on sufficiency proposes that as long as the wording is sufficient to convey what it aims to convey, the job is done. Then poetry becomes a song for ears.

In the last stanza, Stevens’ proposal gets more evident. Satisfaction, created by sufficient words in good order, is possible to exist in any given small moment of life. The words are sounds and pictures that stage our way of thinking about the world. We see a man skating, we process it in our mind, turn it into a set of sounds and pictures that will suffice to let others know what happened in our minds.

Finally, the poem has no meter, no rhyme scheme, and is written in free verse. Stevens doesn’t tell us but rather show the ideal structure of a modern poem. It is in free form.

To sum up, in Of Modern Poetry, Stevens argues the modern poem must be the free verse that sings us of what the mind comprehends from experiencing day to day living, in words that will suffice in conveying that comprehension.

That’s it.