Of Modern Poetry
Wallace Stevens often created dialogues between
the figures in his poems as they wrestled with intri-
cate philosophical questions concerning the nature
of reality. J. Hillis Miller in ‘‘William Carlos Wil-
liams and Wallace Stevens,’’ writes that Stevens’s
poetry can be considered ‘‘as one immense long
meditative poem, broken somewhat arbitrarily
into sections. This poem is the record of that unend-
ing dialogue of imagination and reality that was the
life of the mind for Stevens.’’ The dialogue between
imagination and reality is enacted in ‘‘Of Modern
Poetry,’’ one of the pieces in Wallace Stevens’sParts
of a World(1942) and one of his most eloquent and
thematically significant poems. The poem has been
widely anthologized and can be found inThe Col-
lected Poems of Wallace Stevens(1954).
‘‘Of Modern Poetry’’ is a meditation on the
search for significance and the role that the imagi-
nation plays in that search. Using theatrical meta-
phors, the speaker insists that traditional poetry,
with its predetermined scenes and script, cannot
provide a sense of meaning in the actual contempo-
rary world, and so a new modern poetry must take
on the challenge. Stevensoutlines in the remainder
of the poem arguments for a poetry that pays
attention to the details of the living world, which
includes both the personal and the political. Mod-
ern poetry, he insists, must observe the reality of the
place and also the subject of that place, for example,
the look of a man skating or a woman dancing or
combing her hair. Ultimately, Stevens illustrates
how the interplay of poem, poet, and reader can168
WALLACE STEVENS
1942