Scott Price
Natalie Anderson
English 118 Modern Poetry
April 24, 2000

 

"On Modern Poetry":

Central Concepts to Wallace Stevens' Poetics

 

The essay of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice. The poem, wandering or prevaricating around the point it seeks, and perhaps self-consciously discussing its self-conscious wanderings. "Of Modern Poetry" (PEM 174) is perhaps the most direct of many of Stevens' poems about poetry itself. However, in directly addressing his poetics, and exhibiting its own prescriptions, it circles around certain concepts central to the theory itself. Poetry must change in response to some crisis which has set it adrift; the new poetry must have some sort of dynamism; it must interact with its audience in new ways&emdash; but the specifics of the poem are absent, and the poem seems to be an abstract of some larger discussion of poetics. Several other poems can help the reader to understand the underpinnings of "Of Modern Poetry": "Connoisseur of Chaos" (PEM 166) discusses the logic behind poetry's fragmentation and new subjectivity, while "The Idea of Order at Key West" (PEM 97) helps to unpack the complex image of the new poet and to examine the reader's new relationship with poetry. Set beside each other, the three poems are a particularly useful subset of the work for examining those major themes of Stevens' poetics.

The first stanza of "Of Modern Poetry" is fairly straightforward as a eulogy, a history of the search for meaning through poetry, and it serves as an introduction to the more abstract second verse. The speaker begins with a sort of epigraph, a caption: "The poem of the mind in the act of finding/What will suffice." As the rest of the stanza works in the past tense, we may apply that caption to "Of Modern Poetry" itself, and the rest of the stanza as, perhaps, a footnote to that caption, an explanation that this poem is so metapoetic because it's a bit confused right now. The caption could also apply to modern poetry in general, however, and the ambiguity allows the poem to both speak about modern poetry and represent it. Even in the first phrase, for instance, there is the sense that the reader has interrupted an ongoing process, as the phrase does not constitute a complete sentence.

Notable as well is the active aspect of that statement&emdash; whether the phrase is a caption for this poem in particular or a gesture toward the genre as a whole, modern poetry involves being "in the act of finding." The rest of the stanza fills out this point&emdash; if modern poetry is distinct from its forebears in its searching nature, then that distinction should be justified. "It has not always had/ To find: the scene was set; it repeated what/ Was in the script." The theatrical metaphor is a rich one, and in this first stanza makes room in the growing mental image of poetry's history for variation in performance, for individuality between poems and poets; yet casting the security of knowing the script in the past tense conjures the frightening image of being onstage without knowing the lines. But the shock is even greater: "Then the theater was changed/ To something else. Its past was a souvenir." Even the space for performance is different, and not even clearly a theater anymore. The sense of helplessness, of shock, is heightened by the passive voice of the sentence. The scripts that poets had been willing to follow before were deemed inadequate and thrown out, and the old forms were not merely outdated, but analogous to an unproductive souvenir.

The stanza break is sensible in that it breaks two fairly distinct sections of the poem. The second stanza begins to lay out the requirements for the new poetry. First, though, it is useful to examine more thoroughly this break from tradition, so to better understand where the rest of "Of Modern Poetry" is coming from. "Connoisseur of Chaos" speaks well to this point, and explicates several abstract points that either poem glosses on its own. An examination of "Connoisseur" begins immediately with both chaos and order, and a logical statement that evokes a feeling of desperation in its attempt to be lucidly simplistic:

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.) (ll. 1-3)

We know either the speaker or the subject of the poem (or both, as the title may itself describe the speaker, making the poem the image of the connoisseur) is a connoisseur: he understands and appreciates the subtleties of his subject, and the fact that he appreciates or enjoys it implies that he is comfortable with it. This sets up an open beginning to the poem like that in "Of Modern Poetry" as the second section of "Connoisseur" displays a marked discomfort with disruptions in the order. For the moment, however, the connoisseur immediately shows his knowledge by ordering the two truths on two levels: each in terms of the other, circularly, and then both as parts of a single whole. Perhaps sarcastically, to affirm the connoisseur's understanding, he states that he has pages of illustrations to accompany the concept.

We see a disturbance similar to that in "Of Modern Poetry" (ll. 8-9) in the second section of "Connoisseur of Chaos" as it unravels logic while trying to support it, presenting conditionals followed by affirmations:

If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon, and they do; (ll. II 1-4)

The abruptness of the affirmations makes them seem almost desperate, clutching; if the truth of the seemingly chaotic statement were so evident, would the short "and they are" be necessary? The speaker's ordering stretches to accomodate confusing incoherencies. If the green is blue, how is it blue? How are the flowers of South Africa "of" South Africa if they are bright on the tables of Connecticut? How do the English, known for their tea-drinking, live in the homeland of the tea without it? Yet the speaker asserts that "if it all went on in an orderly way,/and it does;" and links this with classic philosophy to justify the seeming chaos. In glossing the true chaos of reality by claiming that a law can encompass all contradiction, the connoisseur arrives at a world-view "as pleasant as port,/ As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough" in a painting. To further obscure the glosses here, as he glossed them with the parenthetical you-needn't-worry-about-the-details , the connoisseur adds a tone of sophistication, comparing the beauty of the plan not just to the painting of a bough, but a particular bough by a particular artist; this connoisseur knows his stuff, we should conclude.

Until now, the connoisseur, whom in the poetic sphere we might align with Eliot's ideal critic, has been holding on to the idea of order. Even when presented with chaos, he has remained the "connoisseur" of chaos, not only finding or making order within it but retaining the nobility which Stevens associates with the past ("The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"). The connoisseur cannot maintain this distance in the face of war's contrast of life and death. This connects back to "Of Modern Poetry," where the poet declares that the new poetry must "think about war/ And it has to find what will suffice." The repetition disturbs the easy enumeration of qualities. "War" ends the line, and by the time the next line has begun, the speaker has been startled or shaken back to a reiteration of the change. The theaters of war have forced a change in the theater of poetry. In "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" Stevens sets war as the defining cataclysm of the poetic (and noble) sensibility in a line equally reminiscent of the first stanza: "Little of what we have believed has been true. ... The present is an opportunity to repent. This is familiar enough. The war is only a part of a war-like whole. It is not possible to look backward and to see that the same thing was true in the past." (20, emphasis added)

In section III of "Connoisseur," then, the connoisseur gives up his philosophy's ghost, devaluing the theory as "pretty" and then proclaiming the sadness of its passing with the apologetic "at least that was the theory, when bishops' books/ Resolved the world." It is worth noting how the sentence structure supports the fracture of the thought. The sentence begins with the conditional "after all [this] proves that [all these] partake of one" but then does not continue. Line three does not continue the thought; perhaps it is not worth continuing, since we cannot go back to that. The contradictory facts are too , they "exceed the squamous (scaly) mind." Still the veneer of sophistication remains, with the earthy primitiveness of "squirming" and "squamous" as descriptors of the mind softened by the equivocating "if one may say so." Finally, there no comfort even in despair, because for the exceeded mind trying to make sense of the world, there is still some relation, some way to make sense, even if the new sense will not be as all-encompassing as the old system claimed to be.

The poem changes course here, as in "Of Modern Poetry," to consider what is left and what can be built anew. In section IV, the speaker immediately discards theory A by undermining its premise (if an order is violent then it is disorder). However, considering that the initial logic was presented as referring to a truth rather than the truth, the speaker really just refutes the initial 'truths' by exploiting their existing inclination toward multiplicity: "This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more/ Element in the immense disorder of truths." The system is fruitless; not only did it not work in the past (section II establishes its insufficiency for describing modernity), but it is unproductive for the future because there are too many truths.

The next part of Section IV, however, is fascinating and new-- after establishing that it addresses the same topic (the pair of truths) by opening with the "B.", it then takes a completely different tone. It parallels the discovery of order in the immense disorder (of possible truths) by opening with the "B." and then progressing in a seeming disorder, along a tangent image of the poet's surroundings. In a quiet revelation akin to the sudden, clear depiction of the actor's nature, the connoisseur also writes&emdash;all pretenses have been set aside for a moment. The disorder that we expect the sentence to be discussing is implicit rather than the clear subject. The sudden distance and natural subject creates the sense of a sigh, of a living involvement which simply accepts the disorder, which retreats from even the prospect of contemplating such abstraction.

Lines 8 and 9 make the abstraction seem implacable, however&emdash; there is no getting away from the idea of a higher order, for even a system of complete chaos is an utter order ruled by chaos. We cannot get away from this reasoning, as such truths are not hidden away in some secluded, hidden store of knowledge. They are all around us, in April showers, chalked on the sidewalk, in the everyday world, for any pensive man-of-the-time to see. As Stevens negatively describes the Louvre, he conjures the canon and shows its cold timelessness' inadequacy as a stage for modernity. He also points out that the subject for writing is all around, and is not set at an inaccessible distance. By extension, writing with this understanding requires an engagement with the everyday&emdash; "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."

The connoisseur finally lays out a new order, which encompasses the disorder that engulfed the old systems. It acknowledges the subjectivity of truth, but also sees a universal truth in the process of working with chaos. The pensive man who closes out the poem may be anyone, and he may see truth anywhere around him. What is special about him is that he knows how to look, he sees that which can partake of the order above the chaos, as the eagle which considers the "intricate Alps" a single nest. This perhaps hints at what might appear in the theater if someone brought up the lights on the actor. This reading of "Connoisseur of Chaos" helps us understand both the break from tradition and the stage which the poetic figure of "Of Modern Poetry" faces. The rupture that war has caused in so many aspects of life forces new perspectives, new forms, new goals.

The second stanza of "Of Modern Poetry" begins to lay out the requirements for the new poetry, and we begin to watch the poem in the act of finding what will suffice. First: "[poetry] has to be living, to learn the speech of the place"&emdash; immediately casting off the old forms. The speech "of the place" matters&emdash; interestingly, speech is dependent on place, not time. J. Hillis Miller sees this as an acknowledgement that the breaking of the old forms includes a realization of cultural intersubjectivity. Before the break, "All men [in the poet's culture] thought alike and understood each other perfectly… since they all shared an interpretation of the world they did not think of it as one perspective among many possible ones." (143) The desperation which the shock of war and the realization of multiplicity forces into the search or meaning ends the placid enumeration of poetry's qualities, forcing further enjambments and a Dennis Leary-like, demanding tone. There is no joy in the voice; it has become "like an insatiable actor," and repeats itself exactly as it claims modern poetry must. It cannot be sure that its message will be heard as it intends, for the set scene it might refer to or define itself by, the stable forms of the past, can not speak to the world of the war. The new poesy instead of hoping to uncover human truths, must set out on a far more modest, personal and creative goal: it must "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". (ll. 10-14) It faces the task not of revealing some truth, nor of creating truth on its own, but of writing a script that resonates within the listener, a whisper "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." (ll. 14-18)

Here, again, is an image which skips around Stevens' poetry. In the next seven lines, the 'actor' performs a confusing act of merging the sound it (we do not know whether it is an actor, a concept, or a poet, or each at once) makes with that of an audience which may or may not exist only in its mind. That the poesy-actor must speak words which act within the generic ear ('the' ear), implying that the principle is a universal one. That assertion is troubling after the acknowledgement that the new poetry must "face the men of the time and [to] meet the women of the time" &emdash;does it meet them in any way that changes how it must speak, or is the audience purely internal? And if the audience is purely internal, how does it "[listen]/ Not to the play, but to itself" (l. 15)?

The image is perhaps less confusing when considered beside sections of "The Idea of Order at Key West". The woman there performs a similar act of resonant meaning-making. Her setting is established to some extent, and exists without her. "The water never formed to mind or voice,/ Like a body wholly body" (and therefore not consciousness, not imagination). (l. 2-3) Yet within its chaos relations appear: "its mimic motion/ Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,/That was not ours although we understood". (l. 4-6) At the base of this intercourse lies a sympathy which allows correspondence. Both mimic and work with each other, and neither is wholly creator of the effect which the poet observes.

The next two stanzas elaborate on the independence of the sea and the woman. It was not a mask for her, nor she for it. Nor, indeed, were they "medleyed sound", (l. 9) for "it was she and not the sea [we] heard." (l. 14) She was maker of the song, as evidenced by the long sentence in the second stanza:

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. (ll. 21-28)

But the scene was more than that; it was not just deep air, but a creative joining and reflecting. The resulting correspondence is "expressed/ In an emotion as of two people, as of two/ Emotions becoming one," (ll. 17-19) to think in terms of "Of Modern Poetry". The woman acts within the world as an artificer, creating art which reflects, refracts, and interprets the real world. "It was her voice that made/ The sky acutest at its vanishing." (ll. 29-30) She recasts the natural world, using its resonances within herself, into her own song.

"Of Modern Poetry" puts a very similar process into its own theatrical metaphor by asserting that

The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
And instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through certain rightnesses, (ll. 20-23)

The actor acts as the filter of consciousness in its unconscious sympathy. Common as well across the poems is a certain comprehensive relativism. Just as the sufficient truth which "Of Modern Poetry" searches for seems to have a personal aspect to it, so too does the woman's song in "The Idea of Order": "we./As we beheld her striding there alone,/ Knew that there never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made." (ll. 35-38) Her work comprises her, and, though perhaps a personal world, and one which she is confined to, it expresses such broad sympathy and correspondence with reality that the final impression is not confining. A similar comprehensive aspect appears in the actor-poet's charting of the mind, which is described as "wholly/ Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,/Beyond which it has no will to rise." (ll. 23-25) Despite the risk of relativism, poetry still has a place, for Wallace Stevens, as a superlative part of human existence-- it may still express our boundaries. Buried within that image, however, or rather surrounding it, is once again the disillusioning image of the dark, ruined theater. The mind has no will to rise beyond imagination, to struggle for a divinity which has been dispelled. Nor, indeed, can the mind sink descend below art, because it must interpret life, and as it draws on the sounds in the dark around it, it must make order of them, it seizes on the small relations in the chaos, if unconsciously. Even the acts of combing, dancing, skating, presented in the final stanza, involve the mind.

"Of Modern Poetry" ends with a comforting return to reality from this disillusioning investigation of the constraints of modernity. It becomes a reassuring list of possibilities. The tone echoes the renewed calm by returning to a slightly formulaic listing of poetry's possible qualities. The second and third to last lines of the poem begin with "be" and the quality, and we are left at the end of the list with an epigraph which not only gives the penultimate sentence a referent (the poem of the act of the mind) but also ties that referent back to the beginning of the poem, with one important difference: it is no longer in the act of finding. By closing with the declaration that this, by acting out what it prescribes, is no longer the poem of the mind in the act of finding, but is "The poem of the act of the mind", and makes the act of finding that it has gone through central to poetry and to Stevens' modernity. It has found a satisfaction.

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Works Cited

Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind 1967; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

Miller, J. Hillis. "Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Being." The Act of the Mind: Essays ont eh Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. 143-162

Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel. New York: Knopf, 1951.