Of Modern Poetry Literature & Writing Quotes

Here's your thesis statement for what modern poetry should be. It should be about finding something that is good enough. But good enough for what, you ask? Well, it should be good enough to make us feel like getting out of bed in the morning. Poetry should make life seem worthwhile to us, even if the world seems like it's going to hell. Further, modern poetry should talk about how a person's mind should go about finding this kind of meaning.

In the old days of classic art, poetry didn't really have to go searching for the meaning of life. It had the church to tell it what was what. So all poetry had to do was talk about how awesome God was and how terrible Satan was, and that's all the audiences really needed.

Poetry can't get away with talking in fancy language anymore, or only talking about pleasant things. It has to confront the ugly parts of life, like war. It also has to figure out what modern people want. Maybe us modern folks don't want to read about harp-playing angels and the glory of kings anymore (unless it's a king from Middle Earth). Maybe we want to read something that's a little more relevant to our daily lives.

So what should poetry be telling us? How about exactly what we want to hear? But Stevens might not mean exactly what you think. It's not poetry's job to tell you that you're pretty or cool. It's poetry's job to tell you what you need to find some sort of spiritual satisfaction in life—something a little more big-picture and less superficial than looks or popularity.

If the poem is an actor, and an actor is a metaphysician in the dark, then ipso facto, the poem is a metaphysician in the dark. Basically, a metaphysician is someone who wonders about the most basic questions in life, like "What's the proof for God?" and "How do I know the world around me is real?" So a modern poem needs to ask these kinds of questions, even though the answers aren't clear anymore and the poem might as well be working in the dark.

In the end, Stevens says that a modern poem can't just be about things that are beautiful. It has to be about the process inside our minds that makes us see something as beautiful. Now that might sound a little weird, and that's because it is. But Stevens knows that different people find beauty in different things. The one thing that's common to all of us, though, is our minds' reaction to beauty. That common element is what Stevens wants modern poetry to focus on.