Of Modern Poetry

"Of Modern Poetry" is included in Wallace Stevens' third volume of poetry, Parts of a World, published in 1942 and republished in 1951. It is in the public domain.

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 poem is divided in two parts by a blank line, and each of the two parts contains a broken line, suggesting quasi-paragraphs. Thus the first division of the poem is five lines with the fourth line broken in two. The second division, the longer one, is lines six through twenty-six, with its quasi-paragraph break at line twenty-three. This typography is a partial clue to the poem's structure.

The poem begins and ends with non-sentences: "The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice." And "The poem of the act of the mind." Those are a subject and a recapitulation, but not a theme. By lacking a main verb, these lines avoid stating a theme. But more importantly they avoid tying the act of the mind to a time; the act of the mind is not past, present, or future. It is ongoing. These non-sentences also stress that the mind must act, not passively wait for inspiration or intuition. And the mind must seek to find "what will suffice." What that says of modern poetry will be addressed metaphorically in the poem, the organizing metaphor being that of a new stage on which the modern poet will perform.

The lines of the poem, non-traditional "free verse," do not rhyme and are not metrical. They range from ten syllables to fourteen. One striking thing about the sounds of the poem is that three of the lines have weak endings; that is, the final words of these lines have unaccented syllables. The opening line quoted above has a weak ending--"The poem of the mind in the act of finding. . . ." This dissipation of rhetorical strength is carried further by the poet's not placing the repeated parallel phrases at the beginning of lines, a device called "anaphora", where they would be much stronger. For instance, immediately after the first break, traditional typography might have arranged the words like this:

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