Using theater as a metaphor for poetry has
several advantages. Theater implies a perform-
ance, a live action, rather than an intellectual exer-
cise on paper. It implies communication, a public
force. The script of the past, however, is replaced
by improvisation. There are no guidelines. It is as if
the actor goes out on the stage by himself to dis-
cover what he will be inspired to say. Identifying
the poet as an actor also implies that the poet is
using a persona to speak through. It is not personal
confession.
The speaker-poet makes it clear that poetry
has to be about what humans are facing now; it
has to confront living men, women, and places, and
difficult issues, such as war, using the speech of the
time. Stevens implies more, though, than just being
up to date or contemporary. He also means the
poem has to be written and experienced in the
Now.Theonlywayitcandothatistomakea
new stage, a new platform for itself. The platform is
the mind, consciousnessitself, the only medium
that connects the poet, subject matter, and audi-
ence at the same time. The poem is stripped down
to its essentials so readers/listeners may witness the
creative act. The poem, ‘‘Of Modern Poetry,’’ then
performs the process of the poet putting those three
items together: poet, audience, and subject matter,
using the metaphor of the actor acting on a stage
and an audience listening, to show how it is done.
The middle paragraph of the poem constructs
that new stage for speaker and audience and then
puts them all there at thesame time. It uses the
flow of the words to gather them and to create a
momentum that unifies theseparate consciousness
of poet and audience members into one conscious-
ness experiencing the poem together. The words
sweep them along adroitly through their stately
rhythm and repetition. At the same time the phras-
ing slows down or speeds up the poem’s progress
to create a deliberate meditation, forcing them
to consider phrase by phrase how the poem is
constructed. The phrasing is controlled with punc-
tuation, making short sentences or long sentences
with clauses. After short emphatic declarative
sentences explaining what the modern poem has
todo(uselivingspeechandspeaktomenand
women of the time), the poem shifts into two
long meditative sentences demonstrating the crea-
tive mind at work. The audience cannot read or
hear these sentences logically, for they keep
extending and postponing their meaning. The
phrases do not match up to produce a logical
statement. They are tentative chords on the guitar,
searching for the right tone. The audience has to let
go and get the phrasing as the intuitive music in the
inner ear of the mind. The only way a poem can
unify poet and audience is to appeal to the intuitive
apprehension of words. They cannot understand
the union of words that is a poem; they can only
experience it.
The longest sentence in the poem is the ear of
the mind passage. Before the poem is spoken aloud,
it hears itself in the ear of the mind. How can a
poem hear itself? The poet is explaining where a
poem comes from. It may be an act of the mind,
but it is not an act of the will, forcing out some
predetermined words. It is not a surface verbal
representation of events or scenes. A poem comes
from deep within the mind, like a meditation. In
that meditation, everything is there at once, includ-
ing the poet’s intention to speak words to an invis-
ible audience he already feels. By telling the
audience that the poem is hearing what it wants
to hear, Stevens indicates that the poet’s will and
reason are not involved. He is trying to stay out of
the way of the words as they come spontaneously.
They are a product of the interaction of the mind
and what it perceives. The poet is hearing language
as though it is constructing itself in this act of the
mind. When the language comes without effort like
this, it is so right, that anyone can hear the right-
ness. An example of this is the first line of the poem,
which has become a famous definition of poetry.
The language is perfect and transparent, with no
struggle about trying to match it with what the poet
meant to say. Another example of the rightness of
the language is that the poem performs what it is
saying; it performs its own insistence on both pre-
cision and spontaneity by controlling the phrasing
and slowing the audience down to one word or
phrase at a time, all while it is sweeping them on
past logical comprehension in the long ear of the
mind passage.
The words of the poem perceived at this deep
level in the poet’s mind contain an invisible audi-
ence within them, the potential audience, no mat-
ter who it might be. The invisible audience is the
poet’s awareness of the audience as he is about to
speak, but it can be taken in another sense as well.
The words themselves are so right and powerful
that they seem to take into account all the potential
responses of an audience. This potential audience
within the words is listening to itself rather than to
the words. This means the audience is waiting
there, even as the words are being formed. The
audience wants to hear something, feel something,Of Modern Poetry