Of Modern Poetry

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.