and miraculously, the listeners will find what they
need; they will find themselves in the words as they
are spoken out, as though they were there at the
inception speaking them with the poet. The words
will be as from the combined mind of poet and
audience together, and they suffice, like anAha!
Stevens gives a simile for a poem as two people
conversing with each other, where the spoken
words bring the emotions of two people into one
feeling. Language can unite people; it can create a
shared experience. This is an important assertion
for modern poetry. Often modern poetry has been
associated with despair and alienation, as in T. S.
Eliot’sThe Wasteland.In a time of chaos, Stevens
insists that the poet can put the pieces back
together for himself and others with an act of the
mind.
The second long sentence returns to the meta-
phor of the actor on stage. The actor/poet is like a
metaphysician working in the dark as he speaks. A
metaphysician is someone in touch with an imma-
terial reality, beyond the physical. This image sug-
gests a mystical origin of the experience of words.
They are coming through the speaker from some-
place he cannot name, over his head, beyond his
rational control. Yet Stevens does not place mod-
ern poetry within the realm of religion. He does
not name God or gods as the source of the words.
It is the human mind itself, the imagination that
can perform this mystical act of renewing the
world in words, pulling out of the dark, or the
very air the audience breathes, what is happening
and making meaning out of it. The way the mind
does this is likened to someone playing an instru-
ment to produce the right sounds. Language is a
music that has a physical sound that gradates the
feeling into a flow the audience can hear, but
somehow that gross physical language (the twang-
ing of the guitar) is able to express the mind with
perfect accord. The language fits, not from some
preconceived notion, but because it produces
satisfaction, agreement, illumination, and this is
regardless of the topic, whether it is about a man
skating or a woman dancing. The modern poem is
a shared moment of being that erases the bounda-
ries between speaker and listener and between the
world and the mind.
J. Hillis Miller in his essay, ‘‘Wallace Stevens’
Poetry of Being’’ inTheActoftheMind:Essayson
the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, comments on Ste-
vens’s poems as improvisations that are ‘‘a revela-
tion of being.’’ Being is the common aliveness poet
and audience perceive connecting themselves and
the environment. The poet perceives this being
around him, but seeing is not enough, Miller
states: ‘‘Being must be spoken.’’ By speaking the
being-ness or life force in everything, the words
enliven this experience in others. It is true that
there could be different interpretations of the
poet’s words, just as in aconversations people
interpret differently. Each could go away thinking
different statements were spoken, but both parties
feel the union, the life they share in common.
Stevens’s later poetry moves away from the
sense of dualism found in earlier poems such as
‘‘Sunday Morning’’ (1923) or ‘‘The Idea of Order
at Key West’’ (1936), where human imagination
and nature are different and opposing realms. In
various poems, Stevens takes a contrary position in
the argument of whether nature or imagination,
object or subject, is the dominant reality. It is anal-
ogous to the debate in physics of whether an atom is
a wave or a particle. It isboth in quantum physics.
Similarly, Stevens wants aquantum explanation of
poetry. He wants the audience to witness the orig-
inal Big Bang of a poem’s origin. In the later poetry,
Miller argues, Stevens moves beyond dualism to the
unity of opposites (world and mind; poet and audi-
ence) in the moment of totally experiencing the
Now: The mind dynamically interacting with the
objective world is the field of modern poetry. Miller
claims it was Stevens’s search to find a poetry that
could unify life, and his genius led him to accom-
plish this in his later works, with ‘‘The Man with the
Blue Guitar’’ being the turning point.
In ‘‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’’
(1947), Stevens speaks of poetry as refreshing
perception so that the audience can go back to
the beginning, to the moment of how people
themselves create the world around them. Miller
paraphrases this as the poem’s having a vision of
things in the radiance of their presence, without
any intervening film between man and the pure
sensation of things as they are. A poetry that can
accomplish this, Stevens says in ‘‘Of Modern
Poetry’’ has to show the act of the mind perceiv-
ing the world. Modern readers and writers do
not have ready-made meanings handed to them;
they must continually make their world and its
meaning, not to recover a lost unity, but to dis-
cover it as they go.
Source:Susan K. Andersen, Critical Essay on ‘‘Of Modern
Poetry,’’ inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning,
2010.Of Modern Poetry