The poetry of the past fails to be relevant to
the modern reader, the speaker insists, because it
has become like a script or a set scene in a play,
repeating only what has been written or spoken
before. The mind does not have to engage with
this poetry, and so those works do not suffice,
because they do not provide an understanding of
present experience. Rejecting the prescriptions
of this old form of poetry accomplishes an
important task: It forces the mind to become
more active in its search for new ways to make
relevant connections. Stevens focuses the
remaining lines in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ on the
act of the mind as it creates and responds to
modern poetry and outlines what that poetry
must contain if it is to inspire the mind’s serious
engagement with it. The poetry of the past
becomes a souvenir, not completely discarded,
but serving only as a reminder of what was val-
ued in relation to previous experiences. New
poetry will help readers discover what will suf-
fice. In that sense, it will have two functions—
aesthetic and human—both of which can help
the search for significant connections to the
world and a resulting sense of order and peace.
This rejection of past poetic practices informs
not only the poem’s subject matter but also its
structure. Traditionally,poets provided a detailed
description of a person, object, or landscape in
conjunction with their responses to their subject.
In ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ however, Stevens presents
a meditation on how the poet observes the subject
and how the audience responds to that subject but
does not include a detailed description of that
subject. Thus, the poem becomes a meditation on
the fertile power of the human mind in the act of
observing, creating, and responding.
Stevens delineates this process beginning on
line 7 when the speaker insists that modern poetry
has to fully engage with the present. Stevens
presents this engagement in an encompassing
vision of the connection between the imagination
of the poet and that of the reader in response to
what the poet has written. The connection is estab-
lished when the mind of the poet and reader find
moments of accord with the real world, moments
of intense sensation when the mind is in tune with a
man and woman of the time and the details of
place. The speaker notes that at times the mind
must also engage on a more philosophical level
with the present. The speaker insists that the war
must be thought about, in conjunction with the
immediate surroundings.
In line 10, the speaker returns to images of
the theater, not to reiterate the tired poetic forms
of the past, but to create a new metaphor for
modern poetry that involves an actor/poet who,
after engaging his or her senses in an active
response to the real world, whispers into the
mind’s ear what it needs to create poetry on a
modern stage. The poet does this in a slow,
meditative way, which gives more weight to
what is uttered. The sympathy between the
words and the thoughts becomes apparent in
the acknowledgement that the actor’s whispers
are exactly what the mind wants to hear. When
those whispers are heard, the audience responds
to them in the same personal sense as has the
poet, hearing not only the expression of the poet,
but the expression of their own thoughts and
emotions as well. At this moment, the poet and
audience unite in their response to the poetry as
their separate emotions fuse. Though each cre-
ates a subjective vision inspired by the poem,
poet and audience become inextricably linked
in the imaginative process as they discover
what will suffice for each of them.
Beginning in line 19, the speaker introduces
the poet as a metaphysician and a musician in
this process of creating sounds from a stringed
instrument that provides metaphysical reflec-
tions in the mind of the poet and audience
alike. The role of the poet who writes modern
poetry is to observe the mystery of the living
world and then to illuminate the dark places
for the audience. If the poet is able to express a
sense of rightness in these sounds and resulting
reflections, the poet will lead the audience to a
creative fusion in the mind.
In the poem’s final lines, the speaker provides
examples of what may inspire this fusion: activ-
ities as simple as a man skating and a woman
dancing or a woman combing her hair, at play
and at rest in the present. The imaginative sym-
pathy that can arise between the poet, the poem,
and the audience leads to the discovery of satis-
faction, which by the end of the poem becomes
the definition of what will suffice: the ultimate
goal, the speaker insists, of modern poetry.
Source:Wendy Perkins, Critical Essay on ‘‘Of Modern
Poetry,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2010.Susan K. Andersen
Andersen is a writer and teacher with a Ph.D. in
English literature. In this essay, she considers
Wallace Stevens’s definition of modern poetry
in ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ as an act of mind thatOf Modern Poetry