Stevens wrote these opening lines of “Of Modern Poetry” in 1940, when the old forms of poetry felt suddenly inadequate. The inherited meters, subjects, and conventions no longer fit the moment. The theatre had changed. The scene was no longer set. Whatever came next would have to be found.

We find ourselves in another such moment. The old scripts we relied on (how we learned our crafts, how we distinguished our work, how we understood the relationship between effort and output) no longer quite hold. The theatre has changed to something else, and its past is becoming a souvenir.

What catches me here is the phrase “the poem of the mind in the act of finding.” The emphasis falls on the searching, not the arrival. Stevens goes on in the full poem to describe an “insatiable actor” and “a metaphysician in the dark, twanging a wiry string.” Someone working without certainty, discovering the destination through the motion itself.

The poem closes with ordinary images: a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman combing. The finding of a satisfaction. In a moment when the scale of what machines can generate might make our own creations feel small, this offers something. Not a grand answer. Just the suggestion that what we seek may not be the perfect or the triumphant, but simply what will suffice.