result in understanding and a sense of contentment,
which, he insists, must become the ultimate goals of
modern poetry.
Author Biography
Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in
Reading, Pennsylvania, to Garrett and Margare-
tha Stevens. Stevens’s father, who was a lawyer,
shaped his son’s education and career choices. He
built an extensive library in their home, which he
encouraged his son to use, and instilled in him the
value of education. Stevens did well in school, and
by the time he graduated high school, he had made
a name for himself as a writer and orator.
In 1897, Stevens began his studies at Harvard.
During his time there, he had articles and poems
published in theHarvard Advocate. After his third
year, Stevens had to abandon his education
because of financial difficulties. He soon landed a
position as a reporter at theNew York Tribune,
which afforded him the opportunity to observe the
city as subject matter for his poetry.
After Stevens grew bored with reporting, he
briefly gave up his dream of being a writer when
his father convinced him to pursue a degree in law.
In 1903, Stevens graduated from the New York
School of Law, and in 1904, he was admitted
to the New York Bar. During the next few years,
he worked in various law firms, and in 1908, he
accepted a position as an insurance lawyer for the
American Bonding Company.
Stevens remained in this profession through-
out his working life but continued his love affair
with the written word and so began his fruitful
association with several prominent writers and
painters in New York’s Greenwich Village, includ-
ing William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore,
E. E. Cummings, and Alfred Kreymborg. By
1913, Stevens resumed writing poetry and one
year later began seeing his work published in lit-
erary magazines. In 1915, he wrote his first major
poems, ‘‘Peter Quince at the Clavier’’ and ‘‘Sunday
Morning.’’ The next year, he tried his hand at
playwriting, which resulted in his prize-winning
play,Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise.
Harmonium, his first collection of poetry, was
published in 1923 but aroused little interest. After
the publication of his next collection,Ideas of
Order, however, Stevens acquired a reputation
among a small but influential group of writers and
critics as an important, new American poet. Stevens
wrote ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ one of the collected
pieces in hisParts of a World(1942), during the
latter part of his career when his poetry was increas-
ingly more meditative.
Stevens’s poetry eventually earned him critical
acclaim and several awards, including the Bollin-
gen Prize for Poetry in 1950, the National Book
Award for best poetry in 1951 forThe Auroras of
Autumn, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and
another National Book Award in 1955 forThe
Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.
During the early 1950s, Stevens suffered from
cancer and was repeatedly hospitalized. He died of
the disease on August 2, 1955, in Hartford,
Connecticut.Poem Summary
The first line of ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is a sentence
fragment focused on the creative powers of the
mind searching for something that will bring a
form of satisfaction. The first line breaks after the
word ‘‘finding,’’ which highlights the act of find-
ing rather than what is found, suggesting that theWallace Stevens(The Library of Congress)
Of Modern Poetry