by Tracy Budden
In "Of Modern Poetry," Stevens describes the purpose of modern poetry given what the audience knows and values. Modern poetry must be different from traditional poetry, because people of his time perceive themselves and their world differently than the people of earlier times. Stevens suggests that war, like other changes, have affected what people believe. Poetry must reflect to its audience what they want to hear. It must show them that the order, meaning and value they need is real, insomuch as their minds both need it and can create it.
OF
MODERN POETRY
The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an 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 actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
Poetry is highly related to the human mind, because the order and truth in the mind of the poet is the source of it and the audience understands and interprets poetry based on the same in their minds.
Stevens first points out how modern poetry differs from traditional poetry. The implication is that people are now questioning some fundamental aspects of intellectual constructs that used to be considered necessary and true. In particular Stevens questions tradition of reading the book of nature, of starting with religious presumptions and assuming nature communicates these ideas to humans. Other traditions had changed as well -- thoughts about the social roles of men and women and social propriety; thoughts about religious values and scientific discovery; nature and purpose of communication resulting from new inventions. These changes sometimes reflected, sometimes caused the development of new values. The rest of the poem records the change that occurs after traditional assumptions are uprooted.
The past was a souvenir because once people realized that certain traditions could be changed, they had no reason to believe those traditions had to be the standard. Like a souvenir, the scene and the script became only a reminder of where people had been, it has no practical use for the present. Once people conceived of a new stage, a new script, a new way of thinking, it had to be experimented with. They valued experimentation, because they did not have a required standard. They valued finding out what is possible.
He explains that poetry has to adapt so that it can meet people as they are in the present -- how they view themselves and their world. Poetry has to change with the times. It is subject to culture and must evolve as culture evolves; otherwise, it would not belong to its contemporary culture or its people.
This modern poetry "has to think about war," because the people did. The poetry, like the people, had to take in account all the effects of war, all the ideas and values that had resulted from the kind of war WWI was. It was the first mechanized war. Instead of the charge and stand tactic of previous wars and battles, soldiers built trenches. There were new, more devastating weapons and machinery. The idea of civilians were not combatants had been challenged. In part because of new media, propaganda was utilized.1 People had to digest all these changes and the affects of them. The horror of war caused people to ask about the meaning of life and question whether there can be any inherent benevolence in the world, outside of what humans can create. Without a transcendent source of benevolence, people doubt that their is anything personal in the universe besides humanity. When the traditional concept of a benevolent and personal God is questioned, people begin to question whether a source of order can be find without a God. They needed a poetry that would wrestle with their questions and address the perspective of a culture that could no longer hold onto the values of the previous generation.
Stevens brings up the idea of finding what will suffice or finding what will satisfy three times in this poem. He values in literature the ability to experiment and explore -- thus its aim may be to find. But it should not search for any the truth or record reality without regard to the importance of the human mind. The human mind itself must be an object so that people can understand why they see the world as they do through the mind. Poetry needs to find what will suffice. What will suffice then must be in reference to what will suffice for humanity. Poets must experiment to find what people want from it. Since so many values and traditions have been questioned, people may not want to find ultimate reality, to find an order, purpose, meaning outside of themselves, so much as to find enough to live on, with the knowledge that there is no higher order than that which they create.
The poetry cannot be satisfied because if it is, it will miss so much. It must always be able to change because people change. It must speak slowly and with meditation because reality cannot be easily found. If there is any reality that cannot be subject to the human mind, then there is reality that cannot be found at all by humans. People of an older era had a stage that Stevens contemporaries no longer believe in. They see that the generations before them had been confused about the difference between what people think is real independent of themselves and what they inferred as objective what is limited to the subjective (or at least to the conventions of human society). For example, people used to read order and meaning in nature, but now people realize reading nature in this way is actually people superimposing their need for order and meaning onto something that has no intrinsic order or meaning. Poetry cannot continue to voice the values of tradition which Stevens' contemporaries now perceive to be illusions. Modern poetry must address what people now believe, what they have discovered to be true.
The
people have learned to listen to themselves, because the order and the values
that they desire can only come from them. They had decided to examine the nature
of their desires for order and meaning, so as to create it for themselves. They
would not look for an external and transcendent cause for their nature and desires.
After all, many people believed the impersonal and ultimately purposeless process
of evolution caused man and the particular nature of his mind, instead of a
personal Creator or a spiritual universe. (The implications of evolution were
becoming more clear.) Emotion can only belong to what is personal. If there
is nothing personal in the universe besides humans, the humans must listen to
themselves in order to satisfy their need for the personal. Because the emotion
is expressed or reflected by this modern poetry it seems to show something personal
or at least something real that is responding to and interacting with humanity.
So it can address the need found in human nature. Human nature needs both meaning
and truth. Poetry cannot give them the meaning or order traditional religions
promised, but humans do not want that anyway, because they do not believe those
promises are true. So humans cannot accept meaning from a worldview that they
cannot accept as true.
Emotions expressed in poetry at least show us human nature. Thus, poetry expresses
an emotion belonging only to humans, though it seems to be humanity is connecting
with someone else. The someone else is only the poetry, reflecting back an emotion.
The emotion of the poetry and the emotion of the audience connect, giving the
audience a sense of relating to someone external to humans. The emotion becomes
one, satisfying their need for an experience of convergence with something .
It is expressed this way, "as of two," though the only source of emotion
is humanity. Poetry is able to make it seem to be interaction with someone higher
because poetry involves interaction between people. In making poetry from his
mind, the poet finds that others can understand and relate. And a reader of
poetry can find that reflections of the poet's values and thoughts are similar
to those of the reader. It seems that this is the most humans can get out of
their desire to connect with other persons and the characteristics that Stevens
insinuates belong only to persons (not to nature): order, values, meaning, purpose,
and emotions. Poetry, then, is to give -- not some independent truth -- but
the truth about what the mind of man wants to hear. It expresses to humans what
is true about human nature, as if that is all that is valuable, because that
is all that is left to be valuable. It is all that is left for people who have
questioned the traditional sources of authority, so they want to value what
they subjectively choose to value.
Though poetry must operate to give voice to what the audience believes, it does more than just argue for what can be known. It is a metaphysician -- it must express the way things really are. But poets must recognize that if their poems are indeed metaphysicians, they are in the dark. The true nature of people and the world is more accessible now that traditional values have been relinquished. However, what people now recognize is that truth is not so easy to find. Stevens asks for a poetry that recognizes that value and order are found in the human mind and that gives the human mind the value and order it wants.
Good poetry has quality and truth about it for its audience -- "rightnesses." It is to meet and engage all of the mind -- that is its purpose and goal. Stevens may mean that good poetry does not descend below the mind because poetry should not; if it is good, it cannot. Poetry descends below the mind when it appeals to religion or other kinds of normative values that its audience does not believe. Such appeals do not engage the minds of this audience, the way it may have for people of the past. The people of this audience believe they know better than to believe those values. For example, some may not believe religious claims because they know scientific truth that contradicts with claims of religion. They do not believe in reading the book of nature, because there is no God or transcendent being to affect nature, much less communicate through nature. The audience would not find such poetry right or true to them, because such poetry does not connect with the beliefs of its audience. Good modern poetry on the other hand, seems right to people because it acknowledges and is based in the values and understanding of its audience. Specifically, once they have come to realize that poetry can do this -- be for their minds, they begin to expect poetry to do this. Therefore, poets must supply poetry that satisfies their audience's expectations. Furthermore, Stevens writes that poetry has no will to rise above the mind. Once poets have learned how to write for an audience that is skeptical of religion and traditional social values, they cannot write with the perspective of trying to find truth about a God or to find a reason why humanity should be the center of the universe run by evolution. However, humanity can make itself the center of the universe as much as is possible, by choosing to value their own minds. Since humanity can develop values, desire order and make judgments and there is no higher authority for such things, humanity is the best source for value, order and truth claims. The human mind has been the source of values all along, but people used to be realists about those values, thinking that they were derived from something independent of the mind.
Stevens gives three specific examples of topics for poetry. They all involve people and people doing one kind of action. His particular examples represent in his poem all specific examples. Therefore, it is interesting to notice that he finds women as representative of humanity as men. Again, this reflects the beliefs of people of his time -- social roles of men and women and social propriety of the past were not held by modern people. Poets must recognize this change and reflect the sensibilities of their audiences.
The audience of modern poetry should be the mind, the contents of modern poetry should be from the mind, and the source of modern poetry is the mind of the poet. Humans can act on their ability to create a new conceptual and cultural play derived from values and truths of their minds. Writing modern poetry, likewise is poets acting on their ability to create from the mind and respond to people who have learned to look to themselves for order and meaning. Thus, the poem is of the act of the mind.
1from the
Web of American Poetry, teaching notes of Wes Chapman, 10-16-01
last modified 12/9/01
