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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.
Wallace Stevens
Read poems about / on: poem, woman, women, war, people, poetry, dark, time, change, dance, rose
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Click here to write your comments about this poem (Of Modern Poetry by Wallace Stevens)
Gary Witt (1/4/2007 8:37:00 PM)
At first blush this seems like a fairly straight-forward “ars poetica.” In fact, it seems so straight-forward that even after several readings I was a little bit disappointed. Compare and contrast this with Stevens’ “Poetry is a Destructive Force, ” and you might see what I mean. This seems downright pedestrian by comparison. Big chunks of it could have been written by Ovid or Homer. What’s Stevens doing rehashing this stuff?
Furthermore, in this context I found the notion of a poem being “the act of finding what will suffice, ” well…lacking, ironically enough. And Stevens even places additional emphasis on the word “suffice” by repeating it in the tenth line. Does it mean that modern poets (and therefore modern audiences) should settle for “C average” work? Shouldn’t the poem of the mind actually be in the act of finding what will knock your socks off? Or perhaps the poem of the mind should be in the act finding what “rings true.” (Indeed, if Stevens had used that phrase it would have fit hand-in-glove with several of his other works, e.g., “Poem Written at Morning” and “Not Ideas About the Thing, but the Thing Itself.”) Have modern standards lapsed so thoroughly that we now settle for “good enough? ”
Also, I’m sure this is a result of my own ignorance, but I cannot recall a specific period in history when the poetic “scene” was “set” or when poets were able simply to repeat what was in the “script.” Nor can I point to a moment in history when “the theater was changed.” When I first read this line I immediately thought of the Globe, but if Shakespeare was simply repeating what was in the “script” then I’d like to know over whose shoulder he was glancing (Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and all the others notwithstanding) . Try telling Chaucer, Milton, or Pope that they were merely repeating what was in a script.
Certainly cultures have been more cohesive at some times in history than at others. Moreover, I think it is always true that the “current” era—whenever that may be—is always the least cohesive and the most heterogeneous of all. So, hindsight being 20/20, Stevens is certainly correct that the scene was more “set” in bygone times. In that sense, however, this poem is about Poetry Throughout the Ages and not just about modern poetry. The past is always souvenir, even from the day before yesterday.
Poetry has always had to be living, to learn the speech of the place, face the men and meet the women of the time. Think about war? Let’s talk Homer or the Beowulf author. In this context, I don’t mean to quibble, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the audience has changed, rather than the theater.
Then, in approximately the middle of the second stanza, we find that the poem of the mind must “[w]ith 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.” The phrase, “that which it wants to hear, ” troubles me, as does the notion of the audience listening to itself. It sounds as if the job of poetry is merely to reinforce existing opinions, mores, and cultural standards. It sounds, in short, as if the poet’s job is to encourage complacency.
And that’s just plain unacceptable. It most emphatically does not “suffice.”
So, faced with two problems (“suffice” and “that which it wants to hear”) I started going back to Stevens’ other work to try to get my bearings. At this point I’d like to offer the following alternative reading.
I don’t believe Stevens is talking about poets and poetry here. I believe Stevens is talking about people in general, or more precisely people who think and who seek truth. The “poem of the mind” is a metaphor for our own individual thought processes. We are all in the act of finding that which will suffice for ourselves—a meaning which we individually will find satisfactory. In the past our beliefs may have been dictated to us by a church or a government or a feudal lord. But the theater has changed, not just the audience. Our mental processes must be “living, ” they must be alive. We must all think about war. (The poem was written in or around 1940. I’m sure everyone was thinking about war.) We must all build our own stage. We must “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…” We must look within ourselves and speak what we know, deep down, to be true in the “delicatest ear” of our own mind, filtering our words through “sudden rightnesses, ” below which our minds “cannot descend, ” and beyond which our minds have “no will to rise.” And then, as we speak what we know deep down to be true, we have our own audience—our outward personality, or our conscious mind—who must approve our words. In this sense, the audience is indeed listening to itself, not with complacency but with a critical ear. What we say is true within us must make sense to—and find accord with—our conscious mind. Deep-seated emotions come into direct contact with surface emotions, so to speak, and resolve themselves into a single emotion. We begin in duality and conclude in unity or oneness.
In the end, we find truth in a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing, or in the “scrawny cry” of a bird. (See “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself.”) |
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Wallace Stevens
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