'Of Modern Poetry' BY WALLACE STEVENS
I request readers to read the poem from the above link and then read my review. Thanks.
This is a poem on the evolution of poem in the modernist era. The carving of a poem and reading both have come forward a long way from the meter and sonnets to free verse and modernism in the twentieth century. The first stanza of the poem reminds us that poem after poem was repeating a pre-scripted expression and content:
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.
What is an important attribute of modern poem?
‘It has To construct a new stage./ It has to be on that stage/ And, like an insatiable actor’ the poet mentions in the next stanza. The form and content are whole new in modernism and the stage constructed by modern poem showcases the unique content in a whole new form. The joy of creation and the conviction and contentment of the poet in his expressions are the distinctions of a modern poem as the last stanza highlights:
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.
Mention of mind in modernism gives a lead to ponder. Were not the poems in the classical era expressions of acts of mind? In which point the modernist creation is unique and moves forward? In the classical era, the traverse of the mind was between two specific destinations on clearly marked paths, within the bounds of a very familiar arena. The poet and the reader were going about within the enclosures of a cage repetitively. Neither there was a will to break loose nor there any vigor in the feathers to spread and fly to freedom. This is not so in modernist minds of both the reader and the creator. There is no familiar answer or often there is no answer what’s so ever, for many questions and puzzles. But there is freedom to decipher the origin and inherent power equations and taboos deep rooted in the core of the mysteries left for the reader to creatively appreciate. The visualizations and imaginations shunning a conditioned mind set are the strengths of a modernist creation. A poet excels when she realizes the expanse of the canvas poetry as a genre offers and the visualization that is never a duplicate.
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