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.

"The poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice." This opening sentence, I feel is exactly what the rest of the poem is about. The poems are in your head, the "modern poetry" as modern as you can get, is always trying to find what will please everyone. The third line shows how until pretty recently, poetry has all been the same, it has just followed a script. But now everything has changed, speech is different, men are different, women are writing, and there's war. And while taking all of these differences into consideration, poetry has to please its audience. Therefore, it has to build a new stage and "slowly and with mediation" show the audience what they want to hear, but also the emotion behind what they are hearing. The author, as Stevens suggests, could be a "metaphysician in the dark." Well I didn't really now what a metaphysician was so I looked it up on dictionary.com and I found that it is a student or specialist in abstract philosophical studies. So a metaphysician in the dark could be anyone and everyone. And this author of poetry can write about whatever satisfies them, because it's the poetry of their mind.