simultaneously unites poet and world and audi-
ence in a moment of shared being.
Modernism in the first half of the twentieth
century was an energetic attempt by artists to
create a new synthesis for western civilization,
which had been fragmented by the trauma of
industrial materialismand world war. Though
modern poetry severely criticized modern life, it
took its methods and themes from that life, trying
to shape something meaningful out of them
through art. Modernism turned to the artist to
supply the meanings that had failed to be produced
by religion and politics. In ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’
Wallace Stevens does not so much explain what
modern poetry is as demonstrate what it is. A
modern poem is not descriptive or contemplative,
accordingtoStevens,itisanactofthemindto
create a new reality. The act of the poet’s imagi-
nation is an act of consciousness, and it meets the
consciousness of the audience in one moment of
wholeness in which artist, audience, and the world
are fused. Stevens thought that the modern poem
must focus on the moment of its own creation and
thus allow the audience to share in the process of
synthesis. ‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ walks readers
through such a moment as a demonstration.
Stevens’s frequent themes of the interaction
between the mind and world and the power of
art to change things are highlighted in this poem.
‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ asserts new ground for
poetry in a new time. Modern poetry is not
about certain ideas, doctrines, or even historical
events, but about the processes of the mind and
the creative act itself. The creative act distin-
guishes humans from other species. If the
human race is capable of the destruction of
war, it can also make new things and create
order from chaos. This is the new frontier the
poet can and must explore. Stevens miraculously
was able to make his positive statement about
the enduring value of poetry during World
War II, a time when many writers wrestled with
existential anxiety about the lack of order in the
universe.
Stevens saw the modern world as a challeng-
ing time for poets, forcing them to seek what is
appropriate for making a poem. In the poem, he
contrasts the present with the past when poets did
not need to find anything. The material was all
given to them to work with. A certain cultural
milieu with agreed upon ideals, such as in Elizabe-
than England, for instance, meant that, according
to Stevens, all poems were variations on one
another and the accepted beliefs of the day. The
poet only had to follow the script. Thus, William
Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser often used the
same images (the sun as a symbol for reason), the
same themes (love and mortality; England as a
utopia), the same poetic genres (the sonnet, the
song); they referred to the same world order, the
same Protestant doctrines. The modern world has
no such unity; it is in a state of fragmentation, a
commercial enterprise without belief in anything
beyond the material. God and religion are no
longer the ground of poetry. There are no agreed
upon values or common artistic forms. How is a
poet to make sense of it, create art? And above all,
what is art and the task of art in such a time? The
first line of the poem is Stevens’s definition of a
modern poem that bypasses culture, country,
form, and theme: A poem is an act of the mind
that reveals itself in the process of finding what
words will work. Every poem must find its own
ground. The shift is thus from an old preconceived
order to the poetic mind searching for some new
ordering of experience in the moment.
‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is both ultimatum and
credo: Poets have no choice but to seek, to find, to
move ahead. The past is not seen as a legacy for
them, but more like a scrapbook of interesting
memories. The shift from the past to the present
is so radical that the whole theater or arena of
poetry has changed. Stevens uses the theater as
an extended metaphor to include the complete
scope of poetry: the subject matter, the writer,
and the audience. The image of an actor on stage
playing a guitar is a metaphor for poetry, which
Stevens also used in the poem, ‘‘The Man with the
Blue Guitar’’ (1937). There Stevens worked
through several tentative definitions of poetry,
leadingtoasimilarideaasin‘‘OfModernPoetry,’’
namely, that there is an interplay between poet and
things as they are and that interplay produces a
modern poem.STEVENS THOUGHT THAT THE MODERNPOEM MUST FOCUS ON THE MOMENT OF ITS OWN
CREATION AND THUS ALLOW THE AUDIENCE TO
SHARE IN THE PROCESS OF SYNTHESIS.’’
Of Modern Poetry