Analysis of Of Modern Poetry
Wallace Stevens 1879 (Reading) – 1955 (Hartford)
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.
Scheme | AXXXXX XBXXXXXBXXXXXAXXXXXXXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 010101001110 110111111 11011110101 1001 1010011 1101111001 1111101101101 111101101011 0101011111011 01111110111 1010111111111 011010010100 1010111001 001110101 010111111101 111010010010 1101110101 0101011110111 01001010101 010011 11001010111 110110110 0100101111001 011111111 11 10101001001 11011001010010 10010101101 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,162 |
Words | 231 |
Sentences | 13 |
Stanzas | 2 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 22 |
Lines Amount | 28 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 456 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 115 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:09 min read
- 121 Views
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