Of Modern Poetry - Analysis

Introduction

The poem presents itself as a manifesto for a new poetic sensibility: a living, searching act of the mind that must discover "what will suffice." The tone is meditative and didactic, sometimes urgent when insisting on the poem's duties, then reflective as it imagines the actor-poet addressing the "delicatest ear of the mind." There is a subtle shift from statement of loss or change—"the theatre was changed"—to an active, constructive project of invention. Overall the mood moves from diagnostic to affirmative.

Context and Implication

While the poem does not rely on explicit historical events, its concern with a changed stage and with war suggests an awareness of early twentieth-century upheavals that altered cultural scripts. Wallace Stevens, writing in the United States amid modernist experimentation, often probes how imagination remakes perception; that background helps explain the poem's emphasis on re-creating a "stage" and inventing new speech for "men" and "women of the time."

Main Theme: Poetry as Active Discovery

The central claim is that poetry is not a mere reproduction of tradition but "the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice." Images of construction—"construct a new stage"—and performance—"be on that stage"—cast the poet as an agent who must explore and assemble forms that answer present needs. The repeated phrase "has to" creates an ethical pressure, making discovery not optional but imperative.

Main Theme: Audience and Self-Reflection

Stevens reframes audience in psychological terms: the invisible audience listens "Not to the play, but to itself, expressed / In an emotion as of two people, as of two / Emotions becoming one." The poem thus enacts a dialogic interiority where poem and reader recognize each other; poetry becomes a mirror in which communal feeling is forged and validated.

Main Theme: The Mind as Performer and Thinker

The speaker merges roles: the actor is "A metaphysician in the dark," combining theatricality with philosophical inquiry. The image of "twanging / An instrument" evokes tentative, experimental sound-making—searching for moments of "sudden rightnesses" that "wholly / Contain the mind." Poetry here is both sensory performance and rigorous thought.

Symbols and Vivid Images

Recurring theatrical imagery—stage, actor, audience—symbolizes the public and constructed nature of meaning. The "souvenir" of the past implies that tradition remains as memory but not as active script. Domestic images near the end—"a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing"—anchor the abstract act of finding in ordinary, embodied gestures, suggesting that sufficiency can be found in simple, lived moments. One might ask whether the final list transforms the lofty metaphysical quest into everyday epiphany.

Conclusion

Stevens's poem insists that modern poetry must be an ongoing, attentive act of invention that answers the nervy needs of its time. Through theatrical and musical metaphors, intimate audience psychology, and concrete images of daily life, it argues for a poetry that both constructs and listens, seeking those precise "sudden rightnesses" that satisfy mind and world.