An Annotation of Wallace Stevens' Of Modern Poetry

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An Annotation of Wallace Stevens' Of Modern Poetry

In "Of Modern Poetry," Stevens describes the purpose of modern poetry given what the audience knows and values. Modern poetry must be different from traditional poetry, because people of his time perceive themselves and their world differently than the people of earlier times. Stevens suggests that war, like other changes, have affected what people believe. Poetry must reflect to its audience what they want to hear. It must show them that the order, meaning and value they need is real, in so much as their minds both need it and can create it.

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 s...

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...resent in his poem all specific examples. Therefore, it is interesting to notice that he finds women as representative of humanity as men. Again, this reflects the beliefs of people of his time -- social roles of men and women and social propriety of the past were not held by modern people. Poets must recognize this change and reflect the sensibilities of their audiences.

The audience of modern poetry should be the mind, the contents of modern poetry should be from the mind, and the source of modern poetry is the mind of the poet. Humans can act on their ability to create a new conceptual and cultural play derived from values and truths of their minds. Writing modern poetry, likewise is poets acting on their ability to create from the mind and respond to people who have learned to look to themselves for order and meaning. Thus, the poem is of the act of the mind.

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