Of Modern Poetry - Wordsworth and Coleridge On The Poet

Wordsworth and Coleridge On The Poet

Wordsworth sees the poet as “a man speaking to men,” but specifies that the poet is a man “endued with more lively sensibility” among other characteristics. This representation of the poet is as a man set apart and special in a multitude of ways. Coleridge seems to agree with this superhuman aptitude of the poet by considering him someone capable of bringing “the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.” “Of Modern Poetry” never distinguishes between poem and poet, so there is a unity established between the two, and this melding appears in the mind’s role as the subject and acting power of the poem. The poem is attributed to “the mind in the act of finding” and is about “the act of the mind.” This is an interesting digression from the Romantic view that reason fragments our world and should therefore be left out of art. Stevens merges reason and emotion through the role of the mind in his poem. This replaces the sensibility attributed to poets by the Romantics with reason. The introduction of reason means “the artist is no longer simply the artist but also some sort of critic and a self-conscious one at that,” which is exactly what Stevens’ expresses in “Of Modern Poetry.” In order to create something written by and meant to affect a person’s entire being, mind and soul, the mind must be engaged and the poet must be more than merely extra-sensible.