Wallace Steven's Of Modern Poetry

Modern art treads a thin line between what is “art” and what is pretentious junk. There is no standard to judge it by and no formula to compare it to. Therefore the interpretation of what is art and what is not is left completely up to the individual viewer and there is no right or wrong to it. Art has become totally subjective, an “act of the mind” as Steven says. The only question now is what Stevens thinks of this trend. The purpose of this paper is to argue that Wallace Stevens does not like the almost completely subjective nature of modern art, particularly modern poetry, and expresses his concerns in his poem Of Modern Poetry (pg 239-240).

Stevens opens the poem with the assertion that modern poetry is “in the act of finding what will suffice.” (ln 1-2) This line itself suggests that there is something missing, something that needs to be fulfilled, and modern poetry has become a task that has been taken up to fulfill it. What is missing is not mentioned specifically, although Stevens does allude to a war in lines 9 and 10 when he says, “It has to think about war/ And it has to find what will suffice.” (ln 9-10) Perhaps he is talking about the World Wars

Although Wallace Stevens is a modern poet, his poem Of Modern Poetry is a criticism of the completely subjective trend of modern poetry. If all art is totally subjective, then the position of the artist is useless and therefore all art is worthless. Stevens suggests through his own works that although experimentation can and should be done, there should be a definite answer to what the poem is and what it isn’t about.

This is not to say that Stevens totally rejects modern poetry or that he is calling for a return to exclusively traditional forms and styles. In fact, Stevens himself writes what is considered modern poetry; he uses no consistent or traditional form and he experiments freely. But he also tempers his own free wheeling style by adding in many references and structures from other forms of art. For example, he plays around with themes and variations, as composers do in music. His works are many times also reflections of paintings. These structures add a certain element of formalism to many of his works, making it more concrete to analyze, and find out what Stevens really meant.

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