The World as Meditation

During the period between World War I and World War II, artists of all kinds began to look to new vocabularies and new modes of expression to capture the speed and wonder of the rapidly industrializing world. In America, poets like Stevens moved away from traditional forms and from traditional subjects to forge a new American poetic model. Along with writers like William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, Stevens developed a style characterized by an increasingly individualized perception of the world, an experimental attitude toward language, and imagery that both acknowledges and subverts the increasingly mechanical world. “The World as Meditation” embodies Stevens’s belief that the poetic imagination can compose and transform reality, not just mediate it. The poem’s internal perspective follows a central feature of Modernist poetry, the personal narrative. Against a retelling of a Classical text, that psychological dimension stands out as distinctly modern.

The New Critical approach to poetry began during this time, encouraging readers to participate in close reading of poetic works. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” defines the role of the poet in a New Critical

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